Space is made interesting by what lives in it.

Starfield is a boring setting, because not only does it go with an non-fantastical depiction of space with it just being full of empty dead rocks with some outposts on it, all the people living out there are just in perpetual 2020s modernist globohomo with no new ideas or aesthetics or metaphysics. Wildly different cultures have formed across moderately wide rivers, different planets should create really interesting/cool/horrible new kinds of peoples.