their benevolent CEO billionaire with bottomless pockets because he's just in it for the "passion" of exploring space (I'm hopeful that this turns out to not be true later on, but I have low expectations).

The best reading of it is that he's a bored and lonely old man who thinks space is neat and throws some pocket change at a little clubhouse full of people who'll pretend to be his friends where he can hang out instead of working, and he only really gets invested once the weird shit starts happening. He's still too friendly and whitewashed for the character to really land though.

I think if you have crew on a ship you should be able to order your crew to loot a vessel/spacestation/facility for you(after clearing it of enemies). This would eliminate the need to painstakingly search a facility from top to bottom. You would do "crew action>loot location" and then some time would pass and you'd get a list of all objects in the location and the option to load them onto your ship cargo or not. With this kind of feature you can then limit what the player can carry more significantly (2-3 guns, some medical equipment, ammunition).

Exactly. Even just some option at the end where you do a quick time skip like waiting or sleeping and it gives you a menu with all the stuff that's not literal trash, to then dump straight into the cargo hold. Hell, take it a step further and let all the trash guns and armor get turned into irrecoverable bulk packages just to compress it all and avoid the serious slowdown that having tons of junk in your inventory/cargo causes, so instead of dozens of various modded maelstroms you just have "crate of ten shit guns" that's just vendor trash from that point on.

FO76 eventually added bulk area looting for dead enemies, so the same general principle shouldn't be too hard.