Seeing as the post is written by the person who made Space Exploration, it seems they're targeting entirely different niches here. Where Space Exploration is about challenge and increasing numbers of interdependencies, Space Age seems to be just the natural progression of vanilla Factorio, as in, just keep expanding. Having never played Space Exploration nor made it past Purple Science, I'm interested to see how this expansion will develop.

They address that at then end of the post. After all, the same developer is working on both projects.

Basic point is thwt they are targeting different audiences, but there will also be engine improvements. I'm hope that means SE just gets better because of these changes.

The announcement goes to mention that he was one of the creators for space exploration. But this expansion here is supposed to be for more for the casual player.