I can’t agree with your recommendations of Starbound and Starsector. I spent a lot of time with these games trying to figure out why I wasn’t having a good time, and I think in both cases it boils down to the fact their development didn’t fulfill the expectations that the early versions created.
Starbound has beautiful graphics and music and a charming atmosphere, but the gameplay is incredibly dull, the combat is awkward and clunky, your movement abilities are pathetic, etc., etc. For some reason the devs decided to implement a story, and it’s literally the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. And even though this is a building game like Minecraft or Terraria, you can’t build your ship or any of the boss arenas, all bosses are fought in special levels that are protected from your mining/building tool with a magic forcefield. It’s like the devs didn’t even know what kind of game they were making.
Starsector has the opposite problem, the dev knows exactly how he wants his game to play and implements mechanics specifically to prohibit other playstyles. You want to spend all your skill points on buffs for your piloted ship and play this like a space shooter? Too bad, your single ship will run out of combat readiness and explode. You want to sit back and just command your fleet without getting directly engaged? Too bad, every command you issue consumes a command point, and once you run out, you can’t give any more orders. Unfortunately the playstyle the dev enforces results in the player’s role diminishing as the game progresses and their fleet grows, until eventually the game mostly plays itself. The game is overengineered, bloated, and the development drags on. I’ve lost count of how many skill system reworks there have been in the last decade. The dev is just fiddling at this point, and a lot of the systems he’s been trying to balance for years could just be removed entirely without anything of value being lost (ECM, capture points & command points, combat readiness, etc.).
I’d say that if preventing boss cheese requires turning off the most basic core gameplay mechanic that the game is built around, then the entire design of the boss fight needs to be thrown out and rethought. Boss fights should make use of basic gameplay mechanics, not conflict with them. It’s not like this would’ve been rocket science for the Starbound devs. Terraria does it right, building suitable boss arenas is a major part of that game (the golem being the only exception, and even then only the first time you fight it). They could’ve just copied that like they copied so many other things. The lead dev of Starbound was one half of the original two-man team that created Terraria before founding his own company, so I’m really not sure how he managed to screw this up. He of all people should’ve known better.
As for Starsector, I remember there was a back-and-forth between the players and the dev with respect to the solo playstyle. Some players liked to take a small, fast ship and just solo entire fleets by kiting them around, so the dev implemented combat readiness to put a stop to that, effectively putting a time limit on battles. Players responded by using larger ships with longer combat readiness and making them fast by stacking both speed-boosting hullmods (Unstable Injector and whatever the other one’s called), so the dev made those hullmods mutually exclusive. Every time players found a way to play the game in a way the dev didn’t like, he made changes to make such playstyles impossible, going so far as to implement entirely new systems and mechanics that serve no other purpose than to prevent playstyles he doens’t like. It’s become clear over the years that he simply doesn’t want players to be effective in the game in either combat or command capacity. He wants the game to be a tedious slog where you lose a chunk of your fleet in every battle without there being a damn thing you can do about it.
The fact that combat is only a small part of the game and is all about fleet composition rather than fleet control is kinda the problem, that’s what I’m talking about when I say the game didn’t fulfill the expectations that its early versions created. Starfarer (as it was known back then before some copyright dispute) started out as just a list of battle scenarios, with no overworld map at all. It was all about ship and fleet control, fleet composition didn’t play a role at all because you couldn’t adjust it, you had to win each battle with whatever fleet the scenario gave you. Combat is what the game started with, it’s the core that everything else was built around. Unfortunately subsequent development saw basically no improvements to combat. Just about the only change I’d classify as an improvement was the command rework; in early versions you couldn’t even tell your ships where to move. Instead, the dev added more and more padding between battles, diluting the game to the point where combat is now only a small part of it and is mostly decided by fleet composition rather than the player’s piloting and tactics. The game has become the opposite of what it promised ten years ago.