Hahaha. Your recommendation may have been one of the ones that convinced me to try it (not that I need much, given my affinity for the series). I knew it was more exploration and combat than story, which is not my preference, but I figured it was worth a shot.
Unfortunately it felt like an MMO and not in fun ways. Very grindy. Story content was level-gated so I'd have to go grind side quests to get to anything interesting again. And to be fair I did a ton of character missions, but most of them proved to still be pretty generic in the end. And boy did they look generic too (Hope would be a background NPC in any other game).
Combat was decent but after XBC2 and 3 it was kind of more of the same. I knew this came first but it didn't make it any more fun. Skells were cool but running out of fuel and using all my miranium just to keep playing the game was not well designed. A few times I just let the game run to get the time-gated FrontierNav resources, and when that's the only way to advance a character quest, it's super lame. (Lin's first quest, had to leave the Switch on while I drove to work in hopes of finally procuring the quest item. Took about an hour.)
I'm not trying to convince you a game you love isn't great, but to me it was mostly not a fun experience. Sounds like the definitive edition removes a lot of the tedium but it was still pretty tedious overall, across all ~55 hours.
