Humans = , heavy amounts of ai, occupation number for ships/stations, deaths in extreme conditions,
Ships = autopilot ai, destruction physics, ship flight physics, fuel consumption tracker, , ability to change velocity easily, delta-v physics, docking and rendezvous physics,
Stations = procedural station generator or system for building said station (both requiring sets of premade parts the engine or a person can put together, docking system, ability to change velocity easily, medium amount of ai implementation, destruction physics
^ that will all be needed for this to work right. And if the devs implement that, then people are going to ask for this stuff too to make that aspect of US2 more complete:
procedural human 3d model generation, necessity lists for ships, human necessity trackers, ship/station insides visuals, changing numbers as people are born and die, better destruction visuals...
Do you see where I'm going with this? If they just do whatever we all want all them time every time someone asks, we're gonna end up killing them of exhaustion or the updates will just take even longer because the bug lists will be longer and more intertwined and harder to weed out the problem, meaning each bug will take longer to fix, plus every flood of new feature requests has to be taken into account, and this sort of thing already happens (thats why alpha 19 took so long to be finished but also had so many preview versions) but if we veer off what US2 already is enough that problem will just get tens of times worse. The devs are going in the direction of adding simple life simulation but I seriously doubt they'll add intelligent ai/human aspects or if they do it won't be much and will be only polished enough to not have serious bugs, not polished enough to be considered another whole feature branch.