Unfortunately I have no friends because I’m a bit of a twat, and while I get your point about the journey – it’s pretty much what I enjoyed for that 100h – it didn’t manage to carry me too far.
Notably for the vast majority of that 100h (probably closer to 200–300h tbh, since I also played on PS4 when that was a thing) I explored; I absolutely loved the “magnificent desolation” of being out in the Black, and the slowness of explorer gameplay compared to the pew pew “careers.” I just wished there’d been more variation to the planets and the life you could find on them, more variation to Guardian ruins, and so on, and so it started feeling like I’m just seeing the same half-dozen planets and plants over and over, and it started feeling like a grind in itself. Tried my hand at some of the other career options but nothing really did it for me as much as exploration had, and I eventually sort of drifted away from the game. Never did much engineering to speak either beyond some easy to get FSD things and grind discoveries for a while so I could get a better ship (a lot of this was before the huge bump in exploration payouts so it really was a grind 😅).
SC – or more likely their single player game, Squadron whatever – seems like I’d enjoy it, at least conceptually. Lessee if they manage to release Squadron, I might give it a whirl if it’ll run even passably on a Steam Deck (my only gaming device for the foreseeable future, although that might not be a relevant horizon when it comes to that game getting released).