Idk, old Minecraft generation was excellent. All they really needed to do was make it literally deeper/taller and make the biomes wider. The extreme and weird landscapes were rewarding to explore on their own back then. Imo developers just need to be comfortable letting interesting landscapes from instead of boring, uniform ones like NMS does. The novelty would eventually wear off, sure, but it’d last a lot longer.

And community worlds is an excellent idea. Having custom planets, or hell even just things players have made in their games, show up would add a lot to any game like this.