You guys didn't miss much. It's a glorified box of legos. I went deep into the SE rabbit hole with mods and programming control systems, built a giant mothership with a interior docked shuttle that could also warp, giant 200+ drill head ships to strip mine planets, all kinds of stuff.
Problem is at the end of the day there's nothing to DO with all that. Fighting the AI is both trivially easy and boring as hell, plus it just makes you have to do boring repair work on your ships. So unless you feel like doing that loop, once you've built your toys, you're done.