I'm sorry, but where did I ever say I didn't like Terraria? I said that Terraria had no clear progression curve. Sure, it had one - but you either had to stumble upon it or read a Wiki to find out what to do next. And for Terraria, the progression curve was kind of a big thing. There are countless sandbox games that have clear objectives on what to do. It's what stops the game from going stale. Criticizing a game doesn't mean I didn't like it.
Starbound takes Terraria's laziness in terms of design and shoots it through the roof. The quest system was supposed to be an answer to that - but, considering the paltry number of quests, it doesn't really do anything.
I had purchased Starbound because it had promoted itself as an open source, Sci-Fi Terraria. Because of how murky the progression is(expecting you to jump from planet to planet), there is no sense of flow. The mechanics of Starbound just offer a layer of tedium that Terraria didn't have. Starbounds success comes from Terraria's failures - in other words, Starbound found success because Redigit was a jerk who refused to release the source code to his game, and to update it only when he felt like it.
In Starbounds current state, it should not have been sold. Key features are missing, and the game is poorly optimized. Framerate issues for a 2D game are unacceptable - and the fix require digging through my registry to get it to run. That should be an embarrassment - you would think that optimization would supersede character wipes .That roadmap you linked, while nice, is irrelevant - the average person isn't going to check out the companies website before buying a game.
If you are putting out an Alpha or Beta early access build, you should not be charging money for it - or, at the very least, the title should have been available at a heavy discount. They are selling an unfinished product and expecting the community to give feedback as to where the bugs are or how to make the game better - features that normally a company would have to pay for.