Starfield dev says some of the space RPG's "planets are empty by design

The main problems with the game is the extremely bland and boring factions and cultures. And the fact that it seems like most fights are against the same spacers in the same modular tunnels.

Are the barren quests and factions by design too?

I was wondering if this quote would look better in context, but nope:

Verified developer BethesdaFalcoYamaoka jumped into the discussion to defend the mammoth planet-hopper. "Some of Starfield's planets are meant to be empty by design - but that's not boring," the developer says (cheers, Destructoid). FalcoYamaoka continues to say that wandering through the alien landscapes is supposed to evoke feelings of "smallness." The intention is to "make you feel overwhelmed" at the vastness of space.

FalcoYamaoka really just chose to die on that hill, a hill that is most likely on a completely empty planet. It's possible for them to have 100% achieved their design goal of smallness and making a player feel overwhelmed and for it to still be boring.

Yep. It's a pretty weak excuse
I don’t disagree that a true space exploration game should have barren planets (I’d imagine most planets in the universe are barren), but they should be more like set pieces (like how a tree is a set piece in a normal exploration game). And they shouldn’t be included in metrics used to quantify the size of the world.

Having lots of empty planets is realistic to be fair, but realism is unfortunately boring a lot of the time.

Personally I'm a big fan of the game but I've been pining for a Bethesda game for a long time and I will always enjoy a fetch quest where I have to kill bandits. I totally understand the criticism (although I do think it's slightly blown out of proportion because it's Bethesda).

Overall, the game is good. It's not great (yet, anyway) but I'm 30ish hours in and I feel like I'm 10hrs in. The quest line I focused on after getting my bearings seems to be one of the better ones and while I prefer exploring in a skyrim/fallout way I have had plenty of fun just dropping by random planets to see what I can find. It's at least very obvious which planets are boring before you even land on them. Ultimately in real life I think we can be pretty confident that the vast majority of planets and solar systems would be boring as fuck. Starfield needs some aspect of realism so having one or 2 planets or moons/stations per system that are actually worth visiting is a good call in my opinion.

Starfield felt much bigger for me when I didn't use fast travel. I used to play Elite extensively so needing to walk back to my ship and take off and then needing to plot a course to my destination makes it feel larger. I agree with you on the you've felt that you're only 10 hours in and then when you checked your playtime you're already 30 hours in.
In my case I just played a couple of faction quests and I'm already 60 hours in. Coming from Armored Core 6 I just basically spent most of my time building ships.

The only way empty, barren planets are not boring is if you put some gameplay on them that's not boring.

Starfield doesn't do that. Even if you're into geology, collecting fake rocks in a game isn't that interesting.

Sticking to that excuse, I see.

Starfield is a game about a humanity in the early stages of interstellar travel and colonization, a game without living alien civilizationals. A hard science fiction game with deep roots in realistic science (with the exception of the grav drive and the temples/powers/unity).

It would be utterly unrealistic and unimmersive to have all planets full of interesting landmarks, structures or the like. Sure it could host relics/remains of other civilisations or stuff like that, but that would change the game on a fundamental level and would break the story of the game.

I love that space and most planets are utterly boring in Starfield, because that is the truth about space, it is huge, boring and mostly dead.

But I can understand everyone who thinks that this makes Starfield a boring game, there are lots of games out there that I think are boring (GTA 5 for example) which are loved by huge crowds of people.

Having planets with nothing on them isn't a problem.
It's having planets that all have the same exact things on them that's the problem. There's building that have the same exact clutter in the same exact place everywhere, in the same exact layouts, and even the same exact dead bodies in the same exact place and positions.
- To be honest this is nothing I really have seen so far but that could be because I don't jump from planet location to planet location in rapid succession. I have hours or even days of real time between visits to those places, so I normally don't remember the layouts of the places or the position of dead body's (especially with all the dead spacers or pirates added).
  And that lots of those places have nearly identical layouts is something that I expect, those are often old military facilities, build with layouts defined by military bureaucracy.
  And the civilian facilities are all build from the same limited set of easy and cheap available outpost modules, that those are hugely identical is not that far fetched.
In this same vein I actually want Starfield to be even more immersive. When I take off in search of a new planet, I want to leave my computer on for 700 years while my ship travels through space.
What do you mean that's stupid and boring? It's real.
- 200 years, at least that's what it took for the generation ship without GravDrive in the game.

Problem is that theyre not empty. Every single one has colonized by identical groups

Elite:Dangerous players have been telling ourselves this for a while.

If starfield was firefly but a game I would already have as many hours as exist between it's release date and now. Instead it was a slog beginning that made me lose interest. People keep saying mods will save it like previous beth games, but fallout and elder scrolls at least hooked early 2000s me (edit: without mods) within the amount of time that present me considers a return window.

What I want to know is why are the people that hate it so much so obsessed with commenting on it? Aren't you supposed to be enjoying the better games and contributing to their communities instead?

It's wrong to criticize a dev that you expect better from?
- This is the most BGS game I've played.
  But more to the point, people have already seen this type of criticism. Time and time again. The problem isn't the criticism, the problem is the obsession with it.
A lot of people have hate boners for Bethesda and their games, I think it's partially because of how popular they are, even with each game having many flaws in their design. It's also likely some are older fans who played Morrowind and dislike the direction toward accessible/mainstream design as that comes at a cost of the more intricate/in-depth systems which means generally less customizability in how you can play the game.
Don't get me wrong, Bethesda games can and do deserve to be critiqued, but a lot of people just go way overboard.
I put 177 hours into Starfield, and enjoyed it quite a bit, I have my own nitpicks and definitely just wish there was more content/things to do, but I know that because of the modding support, I'll come back and play it over and over again for years to come. Just like I have with Skyrim (742 hrs on SSE alone, so not including my 360 gameplay way back when it first came out), Fallout 4 (951 hrs) and NV (which I'm currently replaying right now as I haven't since it first came out).