Weird to say but the Synthcop update made me and my gf go back to Starbound after 2 years forgetting about it. All it takes me to take a game seriously is adding Synthwave music and Tron-esque stuff, really.
We had good fun, even though we started with about 10 QoL mods from the get-go in order to keep the flow, but nothing that messes with balance or content.
Since it seems they are finally done with all the reworks and rebalancing and stuff like that, I can say it feels fine, even though it's very easy to deal with any bosses once you've hit the last armor tier..which is not really difficult to do.
What's interesting to me though is that with all the additions, there's plenty of things to do to keep you going without getting completely bored or annoyed - which was my problem back when the only real goal you'd have was to scan all the racial stuff in order to progress with the main quest. Quests, sidequests, building a settlement, upgrading the mech, farming it up, crewing and upgrading the ship, doing this and that, and now the Bounty Missions that progress along the Star tiers can help new characters keep a good flow while doing a bunch of different activities.
I still don't think I'd survive playing Vanilla Starbound with no co-op partners though.
In any case, it's weird to say after bashing the game for years, it didn't achieve whatever The Hype wanted out of it (and it never would), but it's a good game for it's price and it's also cute as fuck. Also as someone helping with fluff-and-stuff on a game project, it's kinda hilarious the amount of text and graphical work put into it. That bit we've all known and praised for long, though.
Of course, the SpacePolice missions can get repetitive after a quick while, and also a bit weird that it's a singleplayer thing (Police Stations are single-player instances that offer different Bounties for each player), but I truly appreciate such effort in a free patch that actually makes the game more meaty.
Due to the Hoverbikes still being useless and shameful, I added the amazing
Customizable Shuttlecraft mod, and accidentally created the hardest boss in the game: I landed my well-armed Shuttlecraft (that had terrain-killing bombs and missiles in it) near an enemy NPC, only to discover they can GTA it if you leave the pilot seat. Thankfully he was nowhere near our base, but it was more intense and caused more deaths than probably all the vanilla bosses combined, and I don't even think it's intended behavior by the mod author (probably just a consequence of all the mods' features) - :
Once we were done with the main story, we've of course added Frackin' Universe for the first time and we are now bashing our heads against it on this beautiful gift to the modding world. It hated that we didn't delete our Characters or Universe saves, but nothing a few bashing and admin commands can't fix. Overall tho, good times.