You haven't played it. I was following it for a while and even sent in a couple of patches (I don't think they were ever accepted though). The ground side user interfaces were horribly ugly to the point where it was hard to use:
(Yay I bought a new weapon! Huh, where is it? In the cargo bay?!? How do I get it mounted? I have to sell it and then rebuy it after I sell my current weapon!?)
At the time, the active devs were mainly implementing new shader models for all the ships. There was even some talk about porting the entire game to OGRE (that at least would have helped with some of the UX junk since they could get rid of the custom widgets).
The game code itself really needed to be reorganized. The way things were subclassed ended up with weird things like all the individual parts of the ship including items in your cargo hold effectively having fuel tanks (of nonzero size), blocking those from showing up in text descriptions, and hard-coding fuel handling code to ignore most (but not all parts of the ship). Or maybe it was armor. It was obtuse, but at least if you wanted your missile launcher to shoot missiles that can shoot spaceships it would be supported.
KSP, Space Engineers, Astroneer, Stationeers are/were all indie space games that look far, far better than this. From the unaliased (0,255,0) green text to the photographic planet textures that look horribly out of place to the bizarre cartoon drawings of NPCs to the stretched out text in the UI bars ('capacitor' etc) I can easily say that graphics are absolutely not a selling point of this game.
The graphics look comparable to Freespace 2, which is from 1999.
Considering it very likely is from 1999, (it is at least as old as around 2002-03 when I found out about it) it is unfair to say that it looks horrible compared to today's graphics.
not to mention that freespace 2 can actually look pretty decent these days. there is a community project that has upgraded the graphics and models over the years. it doesn't look like a 2021 AAA game, but it far surpasses anything that could run on 1999 hardware.
