Once you have storage containers and portals, you can get stocked up pretty well on resources. Also got a shit ton of credits from space fights with fugitives while mining asteroids. Still really liking it, I have 3 bases set up with portals on wildly different planets, looking forward to expanding my network 
It really sorta slow plays all the things you can do, so I could see not getting into it easily, but there really is a lot here now imo
I hear you, I just got discouraged by always running out of inventory storage and having to constantly discard stuff and on PC the crashes. Since the game has a really dumb save system instead of just like autosave every few mins, having it randomly crash at any time on PC and then sit through 2-3 min initial load is :|
Like I got to the point after the space station (which was also discouraging since I couldn't talk or understand almost anyone and just doing one word at a time was tedious) where I built a signal booster and found a drop shit with suit upgrades but then I fly there on the other side of the planet and it needs items I don't have and I don't know where to go "Antimatter" and some other one that's refined from caves stuff but how do I easily even find caves??
On top of that I decoded a bunch of maps at the space station but like 30 mins later when I'm on the planet doing all this stuff I go hmmm, maybe I'll take a break from this suit upgrade and go check out some of these places the map showed...but I have no idea where they are and I can't figure out how to find them. There's no markers to any other planet in space and there is nothing in my logs about them. Whoops.
I wish the game had a normal map screen that just had icon markers for all the stuff you've found, maps you've decoded, etc... other than knowing where my base is and the space station is I don't really know where anything is and it's really confusing and makes trying to find materials a pain.
Also stuff like sodium plants give you so little sodium and my hazard suit keeps eating it all up so it's not like carbon where I shoot every planet and have a ton of it or ferrite dust from shooting rocks.
Oh and man it was sad when I built a portal and a generator to power it and connected the wire and filled it with fuel and it was good for....3 mins and 30 seconds. Like that seems pretty useless if everything will just be out of power the second you leave and come back.
I feel like when you get to the point in the game where you have 1) more storage space, 2) a vehicle to move faster without getting in and out of your ship constantly, 3) a general idea of where to get the stuff you need for crafting, 4) enough language to actually communicate with NPCs....at that point I think it'd be fun. But it just feels like that's a whole lot of work to get there.
I don't generally play these kinds of games since I don't like the gathering/crafting genre, but what I played of Subnautica felt a lot like No Man Sky but better and faster and smoother progression. Playing No Man Sky made me want to go and try that again.
