"building good looking ships" try not using the workshop, your first few ships are going to be more function over form

have you established an alliance and station, played with friends?

idk what your definition of "decent" is but yeah the hand made mission types that don't really bug out all that much, while ramping up based on how deep you are in the game isn't massive variety, but make more ships, take more missions, multitask a little, manage an armada.

their are like 5 bosses or so, and ive only taken on 2 in over 120 hours, I've been grinding my resources and wanting to make a mega ship to coop crew control, then i realized i can barely afford a big shipyard with all the resources ive mined

what do you wish for the game to sppon feed you?

have you smuggled?
have you hacked? (i haven't)
have you manually traded using the trade subsystem (i didn't, i just realized it was accessable to the player and not just the captain)

current it looks like you barely touched the game and want it to present you with something. any game with proper depth is going to let you the player dig as much as you like, to pace yourself.

this game takes hours to progress and enjoy properly, because you need to understand the game itself.

but def play with friends