I think it's very important to distinguish procedural generation as only one component required for emergent, unpredictable gameplay. If you lean on it too heav

I think it's very important to distinguish procedural generation as only one component required for emergent, unpredictable gameplay. If you lean on it too heavily then yes, you will just have 10,000 variations on plain oatmeal. The other ingredients that go on top of procedural generation are what gives it flavour (to torture the metaphor a bit). The next step after proc gen should be physical simulation, systems like erosion, continental drift, insolation, volcanism, etc. will produce much more interesting terrain. Several more layers of simulation can be added depending on the game but for a game like NMS an evolution system and a goal oriented AI behaviour simulation would be appropriate perhaps with some kind of history and population simulation for artifacts and colonies. The problem with adding simulation is that it's computationally expensive. There are ways you could disguise the loading times, especially in a game with space travel, such as travel times required to reach new star systems but anything that runs in real time like animal or NPC behaviour is a hard problem to solve. Dwarf Fortress is the paragon of this that everyone points to, for good reason, but Dark Days Ahead is also a good example. I'd like to see something equivalent done for a sci-fi space travel game but I'm not aware of any truly successful attempts.