I feel this game would have been better without all the aliens. Not every solar system needs a space station. Every planet should not be dotted with hundreds of outposts.
I feel the same way about the majority of planets teeming with animal life, that's the opposite of how they advertised it in interviews. Coming across a barren planet is rare, should be the other way around.
I never watched the leak streams, but was it the same way in 1.00? This is just my personal speculation, but I think there are strong hints that they altered the game late in development.
1. The 90/10 rule no longer seems to be in effect. There are barren planets, but they seem to be the minority based on most people's experience.
2. Planets are littered with stuff, to the point where you could probably max out your suit on your starter planet alone.
3. Blueprints are not a rare reward for NPC interactions or breaking into a factory, they are given out like candy from terminals everywhere. I am still on my pre-order ship and my exosuit is 24 slots, yet I already have three Omega-level blueprints and more upgrades than I can even deal with right now. The progression system has no tension at all.
4. Weird stuff like floating rocks/islands were supposed to only be seen as we got nearer to the center, but now seem to be on most every planet.
5. Portals were highlighted as a feature in the game during previews, yet seem to have been turned off and just left in the game in a nonfunctional state, suggesting that this feature was scrapped suddenly.
My personal theory is that someone (Sony?) late in development took a look at the game and told Murray, "Nah mate, this is shit. You can't expect a AAA audience to grind in this game for hours and barely make progress. Change your algorithm to put all the cool stuff where they can see it in a few hours playtime, and give them quick access to upgrades. And there's too many dead planets, people want to see your creatures. We want people to feel like they've had the NMS experience in 10-20 hours and can move on." I don't know, maybe Hello decided this all themselves internally, and it's possible that 2 and 3 were always the way the game was, but that 90/10 rule seems like it was mentioned in every interview, and 4 was reiterated by Sean often.
Personally, I'm fine with the current distribution of animals on planets. It's still in the general spirit of the 90/10 rule, as most have very few creatures, and many only have plants. But I do think there's way too many upgrades and buildings everywhere. There's not much sense of challenge to the progression system when every building you go into has a new blueprint. I think if every planet had 4 or 5 POIs tops, it would have made each planet more significant and each blueprint more of an achievement.