It's even so much that you can't have barren planets. It does make sense - even if the randomly placed POIs contradicts it to some degree. But they really needed to added more handcrafted locations on the map tiles where there is a major settlement. Put 15-20 places around New Atlantis. Give Neon the Metal Gear Solid Motherbase treatment where it's multiple rigs connected with one another that we can shuttle to.
The space theme the game has was always going to lead to a more disconnected feeling simply because you get to jump to other planets, which doesn't make traversal continuous. But at the very least, just make it so that we can get that feeling on the major planets of interest.
I see people say this a lot. But if Bethesda was serious about having modders being the only ones fixing their game, wouldn't they be in constant communication with them? Hell, not only would the creation tools be available day one, they'd probably give them full access to their engine.