I really, really like NMS. It's basically what I wanted from Freelancer back then. It "only" needs "a few" things for me to be the nearly perfect space exploration game:

• a story with actual characters
  • no lore, but a story
  • maybe nice little conspiracy with you inbetween a few factions like in Freelancer?
  • Or the clone thing from Everspace 1?
  • I'd pay for this as an expansion for maybe 20-40€.
• way better flight mechanics/combat
  • Everspace 1. Period.
• better balanced permadeath mode.
  • it's super hard to get to your starter ship if you spawn on a harsh planet
  • it's pure RNG, if you spawn on an "easy" planet the whole game becomes a cakewalk
  • anyway, once you find your ship and warp to orbit, you can barely die.
  • you can die from bullshit however. I lost ~20 hours of permadeath save because I landed on a space station, the collision of which disappeared suddenly, I fell through but a wave of damage hit me with no way to escape
  • disable camera mode, it's basically a cheat.
• roguelike mode in addition to permadeath
  • you can "park" any secondary ships on the Anomaly or your freighter
  • if you die, your freighter crew doesn't die with you
  • save game is not deleted, but reset to 0 units, all inventory is lost, all ships but one are lost and that's your new starter ship
  • every time you die in roguelite mode, you get sent to a harsher planet.
  • if you died 10 times, you'll get to a planet without air and a single ferrite node in the distance
• on-foot combat like in Elite Dangerous.
  • doesn't even need to be better than in Elite or what Squadron 42 is trying.
  • Randomly generated missions are fine.
  • Maybe add a few story missions, but you don't even need many different base parts or map layouts for that.

What would you need for it to be perfect? I think I'll edit this post later.

Elite Dangerous is too boring for me. It's basically just warp–get fuel–warp–get fuel. The planets all look the same. In NMS the variety of planets is great since 2.0 or so!