I know you’re going to say modeling shop interiors would have been more work, but would it truly have been? I think there’s at least a couple dozen settlement layouts from what I heard, which isn’t that far away from the amount of ships there are in the game. But even putting aside ship interiors, I just cannot understand why the first activities that were made for space legs weren’t EVA and fleshing out station interiors more. Making the stations and settlements into larger interior environments to run missions and do stuff in and adding EVA gameplay like space salvaging and exploring abandoned outposts in space makes way more sense imo as a direction to take a first implementation of legs in a space game than the shooter and settlements we got in odyssey.
I don’t hate odyssey, I just do not understand the design decisions behind it and why it doesn’t integrate well into the rest of the game. The same amount of development effort could have been put into a different direction and made space more interesting with the addition of legs instead of legs basically feeling segmented from the rest of the game. The shooter experience with the resources and experience FDev has making shooters was never going to be amazing on its own, but if it was well integrated into the ship gameplay it could have been something special still.
