When i first installed Empyrion i was super into it for about a week or so, despite lag brought on by the barely up to spec configuration and somewhat clunky ground combat i was loving the game and all it offered, until i got to the end, finished all the available quests, unlocked all technology and got more resources then i could spend in a year. Now what, start over? So i went to search for mods that would add content to the game, but unfortunately i only found a single mod that changes the gameplay, one that purports to change the gunplay for the better, all the rest were ship builds. Now in all fairness there may be more such mods hiding in the deepest corners of Steam or some personal page of some modder but most people won't find it. Mods are very important for a game like this, it is absolutely unreasonable to expect the developers to populate the huge area with anything remotely interesting but, with the nature of the game it is possible for the mod makers to make elaborate quests in elaborate structures without too much effort. It is this that can extend the life of a game such as this incredibly, such as it did for the genre grandfather, Minecraft, there are mods that change it so much you are essentially playing another game. In light of this i would advise the developers to give modding tools top priority, in particular modding tools that would simplify creating quests and NPCs (including quest NPCs), this alone would give so much more to the game then any content update possibly could.
The developers plan to extend the API's functionalities for eventual modding, they stated this when v10 came out. But they also work on other aspects at the same time, bringing new core elements into the game which will undoubtedly render mods obsolete along the way. We already have the possibility to make scenarios, but that is very badly documented, and the wiki is out of date. Players like me wish for the developers to provide the game content, not the community. As development is still ongoing, lots of generous community members have contributed content over the years, and a good part of it has been rendered obsolete by new features. After seeing this dynamic going on for a few years, I decided to just wait and see, with some occasional suggestion here and there, knowing very well that in the end the developers will do primarily what they want, which is only coinciding with what players want once in a while, because there are lots of different players and just a handful of developers... There is no surprise in the fact that the majority of players remaining on the forums are building addicts and hardcore survivalists, as these are the only 2 things left after "beating the game" in its actual state : start anew and test skills against growing difficulty, or build another ship or base.
MC is also still being developed, and many mods were made obsolete by newer updates, but it still has a vibrant modding community, i know the modding API is planned, but i would urge the developers to move it up on the priority list, as far as i can see core game is pretty well playable at this point, all the core features are there, one can always add new blocks, creatures and factions to it but IMO again a proper set of modding tools would do a lot more for the game at this stage.
The core game is far from complete though. There's still many missing or placeholder game systems. Check out custom scenarios on the workshop. There's a lot of newer ones, some are mission focused.
MC is still being developed, yes, but they have a much larger team and a LOT more money to spend. Opening full modding too soon in this game will only hurt the developers and hurt the speed at which they can develop new stuff for the game. With community mods also comes issues that will break the game. The developers have to spend enormous amounts of time trying to distinguish between bugs created by mods and bugs in the base game. The bug reports will get overwhelming numbers because people will break their game with mods and then blame it on the developers. All of that leads to less time actually working on new content for the game, and it makes it harder to fix the actual bugs in the game. Remember that Eleon is an extremely small company. If they get overwhelmed with false bug reports that hurts everyone. This is one of the reasons why they took certain abilities away from us in the config file. People were breaking the game and blaming the devs.
The OP has a point though. The content in a game like this is going to come from crowdsourcing. They are not tapping the full potential of that. I think they need to make it possible to share quests, factions, and POI without having to share an entire scenario. There's thousands of ships and bases. If they provided the toolset to do it, there might be thousands of quests as well. Making scenarios is just too large for most people to do. And it isn't what most people want. I don't want to play through an entire scenario by one person, just to add a few more things to do. I want to subscribe to a bunch of stuff and just have that content added to all the games I play. As far as breaking things because core systems change later... it wouldn't be any worse than how they broke a bunch of blueprints when mass/volume was added, or when you couldn't spawn structures that had growing plants in them. It happens, and the possibility of it happening shouldn't prevent them from trying to tap the potential of crowdsourcing by giving people the ability to create more types of content. They also should at least KNOW what they plan to change later, and only expose an API for things they think are solid. They can do this if they have a vision of where they want to go.
