I agree with you on the aesthetic, and I've made my position pretty clear on the performance.

However, the more I've played the game the more I've realised that it's probably the strongest base game that Bethesda have ever released. It has a lot of extremely strong points going for it that modders are going to like:

• Planets are all procedural generation. The game seems to generate land and points of interest (POIs) as you go. This benefits the mod scene because they can just churn out POIs and people can add them to their game. Over time POIs can expand and expand and expand, making future play throughs more and more unique and varied the more you add. There will never be any conflict over "did another modder use this same spot for their building/cave?" because everything is placed as you go along.

• The real world future setting has benefits to modding by making everything "real". This means modders can just add real world items and clothing to the game and none of it will be out of place. This is easier for amateur modding than being creative by inventing new armour etc, they have reference material to work from.

The politics seems like trash so far. I don't understand how there's no patriarchy, no bigotry, no racism etc in a corporate capitalist universe. If it's there I haven't seen it so far. It makes absolutely no sense for these things to be eliminated in the universe because capitalism has a profit-incentive to never fully solve marginalised people on account of marginalised people being easier to exploit. I'm waiting to see whether that remains to be true the deeper I go though.

There's no "punk" anywhere to be seen, though.

I've seen some graffiti that implies it exists in-universe but other than that have not come across anything in person. Example: