Oversimplification

TL/DR: Please don't oversimplify, or at least add legacy mode later.

The quality-of-life improvements in SE2 are appreciated, but they risk gutting the thing that made the original great, the fact that we had to build our quality of life.

Refining ore, sorting materials, ejecting gravel, automating logistics through scripts, none of that was busywork. It was the puzzle. It was the reason our ships and stations had value. They weren't just props that moved and looked nice, they were solutions to "real" engineering problems we'd defined ourselves. Remove the problems, and you remove the point of the solutions.

The resource loop has the same issue. In SE1, material scarcity shaped everything, where you built your base, how you defended it, what you kept in reserve in case a ship was lost or damaged. Flying with one ship felt genuinely precarious. Now, if you can circle a few asteroids and rebuild from scratch in a session, that tension evaporates. The stakes were never about the ship itself. They were about what it cost to lose one.

There's a broader principle here worth considering, look at FromSoftware. For years, the loudest voices online demanded an easy mode. From Software ignored them. Their games kept selling, first entry, second, third, because the players who connected with the design kept showing up, and new players followed organically. When you design for everyone, you often end up designing for no one.

SE1 built a fanbase around a specific kind of satisfaction, hard problems, self-imposed, solved on your own terms. That fanbase will follow you to SE2 if you give them reason to. New players will follow that fanbase. That's natural growth. Changing course at this point means having to rebuild your fanbase.

If the new direction is here to stay, a legacy mode preserving the original systems would go a long way. Give the old guard somewhere to live.