I mean you can feel whatever you want, I played the shit outta Fallout 4. I loved it when everyone was hating on it for not being as good as 3 or NV lol. I loved the crafting. The crafting in Starfield is eh, the base building is eh. None of it is as good as Fallout 4. The cities are lifeless, with roughly a 1/20 ratio of Drone NPC's and NPCs you can actually talk with. The story missions are its strength with the Crimson infiltration arc being awesome.
But I've gone to hundreds of planets, explored a lot of places and the game is just empty. Sure you'll come across Dodo's the size of a T-rex but that's about it lol, the game lacks the hand crafted charm of the other games and it suffers because of it. "The ridiculous scope" as you say is what lead to its downfall. It's stretched like too little butter over too much bread.
I don't feel that this is lacking the hand crafted charm of previous titles, it's just rolled out in a different way.
The close proximity of interesting locations/encounters found in their other games isn't here of course. The game is filled with 99.9% of next to nothing, but that's what space would be like. I expected that when Howard said there would be 1k planets/moons.
I can understand why people won't like this style, but for me, this is the best space cowboy fantasy yet, and I've played nearly every space flight sim/exploration game there is. It's only going to get better with updates, DLC, and especially mods.
I think they could have done a better job guiding you to the places of note that take place outside faction quests. I've had a quite few fun quests that popped up from people chatting in cities/settlements, or hailing me in space. The latter definitely isn't as frequent, far more RNG oriented. With space being so vast, you'll end up seeing nothing too often.
Regardless, there's tons of great hand crafted content/locations.
I do have a lot of issues with this game though. The base building is incredibly disappointing (loved Fallout 4's) and crafting is also meh. The ship building is awesome, but desperately needs a few quality of life improvements, as does the gameplay, namely a proper FOV slider, better melee and stealth builds, to name a few.