Yeah I had played it too, and other than fighting other ships and working together to drive our ship, it's pretty bland. The content really isn't fun and combat is incredibly shallow. Elite is often considered a mile wide and an inch deep, well I would say SoT is a few yards wide and a half inch deep. The combat on foot is particularly boring, especially since the only thing you are fighting are hordes of skeletons or other players. Other players are more interesting to fight, but still it's a lot of the same stuff, over quickly, and the players just respawn close by pretty fast.
I do want the multicrew in Elite to be more like SoT's, as right now I feel it's not up to snuff in that regard, but overall SoT was a disappointment. It's a damn shame because they were on to something with the sailing mechanics and ship to ship PvP, just everything else is extremely lacking.
Elite does have repetitive content, there's no two ways about that, but in Elite a good chunk of that content is fun. The flight model is excellent and honestly never gets boring to me, especially in combat. Most of what I do is bounty hunting in RES, and I still LOVE it. Exploration is quite cool, especially since you see all the neat screenshots posted on Reddit as people get further and further out. You have stuff like Fuel Rats and the Distant Worlds expeditions. There was also fun stuff going on like when Robigo Runs were a thing (good times for my wallet). But most importantly Elite has something to work for, even if it still needs work in that area. There's many ships, modules, and Engineer upgrades. The latter took many iterations to get close to right, and still has issues, but it's something.
SoT really should have taken pages from Elite, because even at Elite's launch, I felt like Elite had more to do than SoT does now.
