Some of the things on this list are blatantly false, others are clear design optimizations here are my thoughts going through each section with some refutations, and some general comments
1
- Yes every planet has some amount of plutonium, zinc or titanium, and platinum, but this is probably just because they don't want anyone getting stranded on a planet with no plutonium from which they can never take off. Also there are some extremely rare elements which I've only found on one planet in my entire time playing (~30 hours). It's kind of like in Minecraft, anywhere you dig you're going to find Iron and dirt, but you might not necessarily find Diamonds or Redstone.
2
- You can totally blow up freighters and I've seen some big fleets of them all locked in combat with pirates. I was able to join either side, and fight. The space combat is pretty lacking admittedly, but this is totally feasible and LOOKS super cool even if it isn't that satisfying to play with my base ship.
- NPCS run on trade routes and you can follow one down all the way to the surface, admittedly it doesn't look like they can land anywhere, but does that really add anything? They're not getting out of their ship anyways, so having a concrete place to find them makes more sense anyways.
3
- I've seen desert planets, though mine was red
-Planets do rotate, and they explicitly said they toned it down, because people were getting disoriented. Could be wrong on this I haven't actually confirmed if this is true after update 1.03
- Flying between star systems manually sounds like a great way to kill myself out of boredom, though admittedly it would be cool to find random stuff floating out in space, I'd much rather they focus their effort on the core gameplay, which as is evident still has more higher priorities than this to address.
4
No comment, I agree ship customization and flight controls feel underbaked, I hope they address this in the future.
5
- You could technically play solely in space, I've found all the components I need to upgrade my ship from mining asteroids as well as valuable minerals depending on the system. You could totally walk around and talk to creatures/find everything you need from loot boxes. I wouldn't want to do it but it is technically possible, and pretty damn good if you find a planet that has lots of high valuable items to find.
- Crafting is guided by blueprints, but I know I for sure haven't found all the materials or recipes to construct. I've found TWO compound elements so far and found evidence of at least 4 more, so I think the crafting system is deeper than it appears at first glance. I'm guessing there's stuff hidden no one has seen yet (Atlas Pass V3/Portals anyone?)
6
I've seen animals eat animals, I've seen animals knocking down trees (not sure if this was a bug though), and I've seen low flying giant eels. These things are pretty rare though, so it's not surprising that people think it's not there. I've spent 30 hours playing and I've seen maybe 1 really large scale creature, and even that was the size of a modest dinosaur.
7
- There are rivers, I've seen them on a few ocean planets.
- I haven't seen any truly large structures except a giant piece of road that was stuck in the middle of a desert (still only 1 ruin location though), but I also wonder if these might exist around more exotic stars, I've only been to F Class systems so far. For example I saw a picture of a new type of large scale monolith I've never seen on Reddit just today.
8
Yeah sentinel combat seems to be something you have to opt into except on graviton/venom sac planets, I'm not that upset since the gunplay feels more like a gear check than actually skill based, but I can see why this would disappoint some people. Then again I haven't landed on any high security planets and actually tried to do anything with this.
9
- I already hate how noisy the system for waypoints is to the point I will never ever scan from my ship, please don't add giant beacons of light.
- Binoculars marking buildings seems to flakily work, very occassionally it will mark what I'm looking at with its actual purpose, but it seems to be very finicky.
- Radio chatter in space in alien languages would be a great addition, seems pretty easy to do too, hope this comes lataer.