Yeah, The hype created by players and by the media (I think Sony payed a lot to media and facebook pages for them to raise the hype as much as it could), because all that sold this game was purely false expectation. The devs never really showed anything that special in their videos, but the simple idea of it being a ridiculously big universe created all of these false possibilities in peoples minds. When you reach your brain for the concept of "universe", there is a lot going on there. From the massiveness of it, the empty space, all the different types of planets to the possibility of them even being inhabited or not, all the detail and stories that could happen.
In reality all we got was a travel simulator between big floating balls they call planets

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the content part of this game, i've always seen it as a 'walking simulator' with a few extra mechanics on top, some trading, some gathering, some flying. You use those mechanics to travel to new places to see and... not much else, after all it is a walking simulator made by an indie dev, and it met and in some ways exceeded that design.
The problem came from the game being explained incorrectly, the developer isn't totally clear of guilt here as every single time Sean Murray spoke or answered questions he never gave clear answers, players can "interact" with each other, but it's not multiplayer... which in reality translates to you can see other players impact in the same ways you can see new scores on leaderboards. It's not exciting, it's not all that impressive to see in action, people needed to be in the mindset that this is a game like Proteus, an interesting experiment to mess with which has all the rough edges an experiment would have.

However, if we're purely talking business, Sony couldn't have done a better job at turning this into something it was never going to be, i'm sure this game sold a hell of a lot on intrigue alone.

Just going to leave this here... https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTh...es_a_big_list/