Keen have misunderstood SE1's core issue (complex vs complicated)

It's no big secret that SE1 wasn't/isn't very beginner friendly, a lot of people who buy it end up stumbling around for a while until they either give up & return the game (or not touch it again if they can't return it) or resort to youtube. I'm sure a lot of you (myself included) learned SE1 through Splitsie or Zeros Legion or others.

That was one of the core issues that Keen set out to fix with SE2, when reading the dev blogs up to SE2's release & more specifically up to VS2, Marek talked a lot about the FTUE, the tutorial to get players into the game, to teach players the game.

However I think they misunderstood what made SE1 so unfriendly to beginners, it wasn't that SE1 was so complex, but because it was complicated, now I realize at face value those words sound the same, but what I'm trying to say is, it's not how complex the game ends, but how complex it starts.

It's about how many complex features are introduced at once, not about how complex the game is as a whole. If the level of complexity starts small, and increases slowly over time, even if it ends incredibly complex, it will never be an issue to players, however if the level of complexity starts high and mildly increases, that's where the beginner friendly issues pop up.

So what did Keen do then? They made it less complicated by reducing the complexity, not by reducing the learning curve. Stuff like the removal of volume, ingots, or stone, yes it technically made the game less complicated, but at the cost of the complexity, and depth of the game.

You could make SE far more complex, and still have it be more beginner friendly than SE2, the primary way to do this is to slow the game down, but instead of doing that, Keen have sped the game up even more, instead of landing on the planet, building a little base with a production area, then finding cobalt & going to space (end of progression) like in SE1, you now start with a hydrogen ship within 5m and go to space.

To top it all off, they don't even teach you to make the ships, they make it less complicated by giving you a ship so you don't have to figure out how to make one yourself.

My proposal is to then slow the game down, stay on the planet for longer, you know what has less systems involved to build than a ship? A rover, start with that, it can teach players the basics of building stuff in SE without having to worry about mass, or gyros, or thrust in all directions. I even saw someone recommend starting the gameplay before you even get to almagest, where you take out a mining ship to refuel, that's a fantastic way to introduce people to the basics of mining, flying, etc. in a closed off, scripted environment.

The game is called Space Engineers, it's quite literally (based off) rocket science, it's meant to be complex, embrace it, but that doesn't mean it has to be complicated, you can drip feed systems & features, slowly introduce them, not lift the carpet up and shove the players head into it.