It's been a minute since I was this into the idea of a game, only to bounce off it so hard. While the game puts a lot of effort into its tutorials, I still think inadequate tutorialization is partly to blame here - when I played the game, I was left with an enduring feeling of "okay, what now?" and no easy way to find something that would draw me in and keep me playing. Exploration for exploration's sake is punishing - not in itself a problem - but I'm also not seeing any potentially cool stuff off in the distance when doing so, meaning I don't really have an incentive to go anywhere outside of quests.

The game doesn't need that much in the way of changes to become a good game, but the development cost (time/effort) those changes would require almost certainly wouldn't be worth it. If the devs learn from this I'd be interested to see what they can do in the future with a potential sequel/new IP, as that's probably the smarter option from a business standpoint.