If I understood the OP, the suggestion is that the game is a predictable grind with few surprises so players will leave once they realize the tedium of everything they imagine doing. I didn’t read the provided links.
So far I have not found the game to have a shitty design, but I have found it to be tedious on many occasions and on a certain level I have mentally admitted that this is a game I will only play for a short time. The time investment is immense and the real world has more to offer. In a way, the OP is correct.
Aside from obvious functional improvements to inventory management, npc/monster pathfinding, and completing the game world I wonder what changes would create surprises and storylines.
I have already found the game to tell better stories than most. That is actually why I began playing it and when I am not bogged down with sorting through inventories the game has generated some stories that made it worthwhile. Since I have only been playing for a week, there is still a lot that I don’t know.
I imagine that if the game begins to simulate NPC behavior to the extent that every NPC becomes like a roaming player character traveling the world, collecting things, killing monsters, etc. then there would be a lot of interesting things happening in that living world. If I learn enough about the game to contribute then I would be focused on bringing the NPCs and monsters to life. It would really be fascinating to incorporate limited AI like GPT-4 to outline plotlines for NPCs and to auto-script conversation trees and outcomes between multiple NPCs as well as NPCs and PCs. Those scripts amount to personalities and they could be distributed with the game, shared between players, and reused.
AI might also be leveraged to generate new and colorful descriptions of the in game combat for people with sufficiently powerful computers or those who are willing to pay for that feature. As an optional, revenue generating feature, this might enable CDDA to compensate the developers for their efforts. Paying players would get a functionally identical game, but every action and item in their world would get a unique description. All of those generated descriptions could be saved and distributed with the free game too, but the paying players would always be the first to see a unique description because those descriptions would be made on demand for them.
It’s great that so much of the game can be generated and that the player character can theoretically do everything on their own, but this may be a weakness. I can see how, as a consequence, the player is required to learn ever increasing amounts of game meta in order to accomplish goals. This has worked for games like minecraft, but I’m not sure if it is actually fun. I see children watching hundreds of hours of minecraft tutorials. It would be better if they were learning more about the physical world and spending less time working in virtual worlds. A potentially contentious solution would be to expand on NPC interactions and severely limit the benefits of grinding.
Grinding isn’t fun. It would be better if skill progression took months/weeks/years in game and if the grinding was assigned to NPCs to do automatically. The idea is that the starting abilities of each character would be practically fixed and that players would need to find and rely upon the skills of the various NPCs in the game world. If the world is not too populous then there would always be challenges and compromises taking place. The debug feature to switch characters should be a standard ability and effort should be made to refine team tactics and the colony simulation. The answer to most problems should involve exploration, interaction, and executive direction. All of the grinding and deep game mechanics can be left to the NPCs, off-screen and out of mind.
Instead of CDDA being a bags of bags simulator that plays like a complex game of solitaire, it could be a game of chance which challenges the player to use the tools at hand to react to a dynamic living simulation full of dramatic story arcs.