See, that's where we disagree. I have a hard time to see actual improvement and call most of that stuff filler, half-baked and minimum effort.
Ships: Only good ships released were Chieftain and Kraits. Then, I always expected them to release ships in periodic updates.
Mutlicrew: Never expected it because I have no desire to use it, but i would call it buggy and half-baked, and what I actually expected to have by now, NPC crew, is missing.
Engineers: Never expected FDEV to waste that much time on it. Why in theory it's a good idea to keep the players engaged and give them something to do, they went way overboard with the engineers, breaking the balancing, when an "Engineers light" would have sufficed completely and would probably have taken way less time to implement.
Thargoids and Guardian story line: Started up really hype, but then somewhere on the way it crashed and burned, and feels abandoned now.
Exploration and Mining: Nice and small improvements to some underdeveloped areas of the game, I give them that. Very lightweight, but effective.
and so on.
I respect that you don't like the updates, new features, tweaks and QOL improvements, that's a perfectly valid position. That doesn't mean it didn't require a lot of effort to create.