Things I like about OS are the addition of asteroids, they can be a great source of valuable resources namely monos and iridium.
The invasion brought chips, OS is the best source for those, the only way aside from the winter race crates to get yellow and red chips(or at least much more likely, I don’t recall seeing anyone getting them from loot)
And in general, the calm feel it has, along with the feeling of loneliness and the large sectors properly drives home the feeling space should have, not a crammed battlefield filled with explosions.
Now things I don’t like:
One of the biggest current problems with OS is the different server instances, you can’t really change them at will, and sometimes you have a hard time joining the same session with people that you squaded up with.
Another thing of note is unreliability of grinding items specific to that mode, namely weapons and modules that only drop in OS, it was already tedious enough back when 1.5 came out, now it’s even harder to get them thanks to the invasion and seed chips, now more than ever we need a proper way of getting those, they could be rewards for contracts, working in a fashion like the destroyer crates do, available in rotations, but we should be able to choose which reward we could get.
We have the option of reliably grinding basic materials like silicon, crystal shards and osmium, but they are only possible in sectors with high clearance levels, understandably so, but the addition of mineable asteroids kind of blurred that line, in general asteroid drops don’t make sense, there is way too much osmium in asteroids of specific material types, not just regular, rich and poor variants, only exceptions are in rich variants of a specific material asteroid type, would be great if the law of getting a specific material would also apply to asteroids, as they seem to be arranged across sectors in a different pattern, graphite asteroids can be found across all empire and some in federation, then you have crystal asteroids from federation and a bit in jericho, then you have silicon asteroids, vanadium asteroids are a bit of a wild card to me they seem to appear in late jericho sectors, so having them be random across all sectors except the Procssima ones(and Ancient Ruins) where they would be the same as the dominating ore type, problem is we don’t have osmium asteroids, so maybe that would be a great addition, too.
If I had to choose the thing that had the greatest priority in my opinion would be the resources, they are more useful in general, getting a weapon or module that is unique to a ship will mostly mean you need one of that, so it quickly loses value once you collect it and send it to the hangar, in this case, please make the asteroid mining at least have a proper GUI element, not just a percent that updates 3 times a second.