That's fair enough... though I feel like you're ignoring all content that was added for the spaceship part of the came, especially the wider variety of planets you can land ships on, and the wider variety of destinations that you can dock at for trading or missions. Unlike its predecessors, interplanetary trading is now possible, as an alternative to interstellar trading.
As for playing the wrong game? If you were playing ED with the understanding that it would never add features besides those for the space ships, then yes, you were playing the wrong game, especially if you bought the game post-Horizons. Horizons added a host of surface vehicle features, which has nothing to do with space ships either, even if we had to make due with only had one vehicle, even if it was one brilliantly designed recon vehicle that is an utter joy to flyve and has that magnificent wave scanner. :chef's_kiss:
I don't recall Frontier promised anything of the sort. If you have a source for these promises, feel free to provide them, but over the years I've noticed that what Frontier has allegedly "promised" tends to be heavily distorted via the kid's game "telephone," often from the Kickstarter days, during which Frontier explicitly discussed their plans for paid future expansions. A prime example of that is how you're repeating the common distortion of one community manager's personal opinion about how traversing ship interiors to exit their ship into an official statement by Frontier.
The good news is you don't have to "grind" for decent weapons or suits. G3 equipment is out there for sale if you want them, and I've found them more than sufficient to complete the missions I enjoy. My Commander has all G3 equipment, including a fairly good kit for targeted assassinations, and I've yet to unlock a single Odyssey engineer. They're not permanently on sale everywhere, though. New pre-engineered weapons and suits spawn on the Thursday tick, so might have to do some searching to find them.
The thing about suit engineering is that it scales similarly to ship engineering: G3 is more than enough for NPCs. Basic suits are sufficient for NPCs as long as you use skill, strategy, stealth, and scouting. G1 engineering lets you get away with excluding one of those. G2? Two. G3? Three. G5 engineering is only necessary if you intended the Leeroy Jenkins an entire settlement.
The thing about on-foot Odyssey is that it isn't designed like an "FPS shooter" IMO, even if it has guns, you shoot them, and its played in the first person. It plays like a first-person RPG in my experience, even if it lacks traditional RPG mechanics like skill checks and such, and it has decent stealth mechanics. This is why I was surprised that I actually enjoy the occasional stealth mission, despite on-foot mission givers being glorified kiosks, and not the proper NPCs I had hoped to interact with. I've always gone the stealth route in FP-RPGs, so it is a natural fit for my playstyle.
My experience is different. Odyssey expanded my space ship experience, which made it worth buying for my Alt just for that, even if I never bothered with the on-foot stuff, which was my basic assumption going into it. That the on-foot stuff is decent enough to be enjoyable for me is just icing on the cake. I've never let content I don't enjoy ruin my experience in ED, because if I don't enjoy it, I can ignore it.
Odyssey's poor reviews is due to Frontier pulling a CP2077 and rushed the expansion to release long before it was ready, despite the dumpster fire that was the closed Alpha. It was a buggy, unoptimized mess which even next-gen computers had difficulty running. Odyssey still runs poorly many older machines that are capable of running Horizons, especially those that were underpowered compared to the consoles of their day. And speaking of consoles, there is the whole fiasco involving consoles, including the baffling decision on Frontier's part not to port ED to the PS5 and XBoxX.
Odyssey's release was so badly bungled that I'm afraid that it might have killed off the remaining future paid expansions. But then again, Frontier continues to add content to the game, even if it's completely combat oriented, continues to fix bugs, and continues to optimize Odyssey, so maybe there's still new worlds to explore in the future.
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