Gives creedence to the theory that lots of features in this game were nerfed late on in the development cycle for whatever reason - that's why there these weird half-baked vestigial systems that don't really do anything, like fuel consumption, outposts and atmospheric effects.
Todd Howard has already said that the atmosphere systems were a lot more unforgiving. It's thought that it was much more of a survival game originally - extreme planets forced the use of outposts and different suits / buffs to negate them (hence now we have status and planetary effects that do nothing)
Maybe you had to place outposts and mine helium-3 to get further across the starmap (there's a thing about this on the loading screen messages) meaning much slower progress - then got rid because
