I love a good retrospective reappraisal.

I’m a huge fan of this game, but it is deeply flawed. Maybe irreparably.

Why did they give the game 9.5/10 in the first place? Did they only play the first 5-10 hours of it?

Yesish, it is a good framework for a game and has lots of potential but there are too many flaws and broken features. I personally think that the Ryujin Industries quest line is a pretty worthy dozen of hours - it’s hampered by interacting with half finished systems though… and that’s pretty much the standard game wide - good locations or questlines that suffer from the poorly built open world.

After that initial encounter raiding the pirate base did you explore that planet and go to another site on that world? I did, it’s what I’d assume most open world players do… Skyrim really rewarded that - even ESO sort of rewarded that. Starfield does not.