Yes their universe designers have not really shined. There is a gap between universe design and the rest of the game's mechanics and designs. In general, the more complex this X game becomes the more it seems to be lacking creativity in favor of complexity. Many trivial activities are also result of a bad design, as f.i. shooting traffic to gain rep.
You can see that they had no time to finalize some things. For instance planets are made with a shader creator, not a true handmade texture mapping (as I did and as X3 was). This could work if you do procedurally generated sectors, so you can generate infinite planets randomly. It makes no sense to use such a tool in a small number of iterations as in the vanilla map. Because automated things always look worse and vanilla X4 planets indeed look worse than X3's. So I guess they had planned some kind of randomization for the backgrounds but did not implement it in the game. Or simply decided to use this shader tool instead of mapping each planet, which requires long time.
Actually for how the backgrounds are structured, and the possible animations, we could at least have sectors that change internally at each player's visit, like sun, stars and planets moving around and changing position. This also is a cheap and doable solution to improve "spacey" immersion. But seems to me that their resources are limited, many things probably needed to be fixed and most of the players seem not to care about the space design, maybe. The universe designers are probably busy doing other things too that are not design-related.
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XRSGE 7.2.3 is available.
https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/1140
This update is NOT made for X4 7.0 beta.
XRSGE will be updated for 7 after the BETA test is finished.
X4 6.2 + ALL DLCs is required
This update introduces the (SUB-)ORBITAL ACCELERATORS.
These are used to connect the far gates and the main planets (shipyards, etc) inside the SAME sector. This is particularly useful for L and XL traders (REM adds XL traders, if you use it) that can not use the local highways.
In general all economy is faster thanks to these connections and some sectors are spectacular (from far orbit of a planet up to low orbit, inside the same sector) without trade slowdowns.
Icons for regular accelerators are back to how they look in vanilla game while their icon (which is the Super-HW icon) is used for the orbital accelerators (called "sector accelerators" by Betty).
A new icon has been added to the map that shows planets or moons in the sector. It is even targettable.
In Argon Prime, the main planet and its closer moon are within reach inside the same sector.
Some sectors have been changed, Sonra system in particular is different, because Argon Prime's closest moon is now inside the main sector, not in a separated sector.
I've addressed all the main sectors in dire need of these accelerators, in other sectors I used the usual solution of putting all gates very close (while resources are far).
A few distances here and there have been reduced (gates to accelerators or highways), to speed up trade ships. Sectors remain big, this reduction does not change the immersion.
There are also some bug fixes and small cosmetic changes in the backgrounds.
I've started reducing the intensity of some background nebulae, but these changes will be available through a patch for STARS.
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I am expanding some more sectors the same way as Argon Prime or President's End, more will follow with each update.