If there's one change I'd make to the game it'd be to re-envision the campaign to start with the invention of the first activatino of the grav drive and ends in the Colony War. The player has a deciding role in major and minor conflicts and can assist different emerging factions in a highly procedural, generative way. Campaign-driven timeskips happen over control over highly valuable planets that emerge. The final battle can have varying levels of conflict depending on how the player acts, and then at the culmination of the first playthrough, the player unlocks magic space powers and can roll back to alternate universes when their grav drive activates and starts the cycle again, but with the ability to get magic space powers.
As it stands now, Starfield's actual plot is like a lame fanfiction written AFTER the above storyline.