If No Man's Sky can be brought to a popular state, Starfield certainly can too. It has nearly everything NMS has, save landing and taking off seamlessly, and their procedural planets are broken up into sections. Starfield has way more going for it too, and they have loads more resources to pull from if they want to improve things.
It all depends on if they have the will and awareness/humility. I can't imagine someone isn't aware of the glaring issues, but the way some of their devs are being so defensive towards criticism is concerning.
One of the big saving graces for them, and something I can't believe they never utilized, is all the space they have between planets. We can literally fly from one planet (Inside solar systems) to another in real time. You'll even have to adjust your flight path to account for the planet's orbit around their star. Why go through all that trouble making fairly accurate systems to only give us so few ways of interacting with them? Once you reach the planet, you just fly through it, but that's something they can easily adjust.
For some asinine reason they kept everything explorable space wise in orbits. The ships move too slowly to have anything further out, but they can add some new speed option to take advantage of the space. Along with Settlement/ship building/module improvements, giving us real time interplanetary travel are things they can easily add without affecting the base game. Adding interesting locations further out in space, and improving their procedural generation (less repeated/more interesting POI's and no settlements near temples) would take more work, but like the others, doing so won't screw up what already exists, and would make the game far more compelling.
If they do add explorable locations in space, that aren't in orbit of some planetary object, you'd probably have to fast travel there. They say they are going to add more ways to travel, so let's hope it includes actually flying your ships and not just less loading screens.
There are a lot of good quests and storylines already, and they've shown in the past they can deliver some banger expansions, like Far Harbor and Broken Steel, so hopefully they bring their A game with whatever Shattered Space is. They need to tweak existing storylines, giving us options to be sadistic, removing menial steps that require many loading screens, and improving the ones that are half baked, like the generational ship you encounter. It starts off so promising but like too many others, it ends like they ran out of time, or it was never planned out to completion in the first place, like a JJ Abrams shallow mystery box story.
They currently have a mostly negative rating on Steam. That and all the youtubers and websites dogpiling on it has to set off some alarm bells to the higher ups. Starfield was supposed to reverse the reputation damage Fallout 76 gave them. Hopefully they take the CDPR/Cyberpunk direction and invest some big money/time into much needed overhauls. Cyberpunk went from meh-ish to masterpiece, but they did have a better foundation and superior writing.
I always thought that Starfield felt like an early access game with a great canvas to build upon. What they do with it is going to show us what they are made of.
Mods can add a lot, but they can't save them here, there are too many core issues.
