I'd personally put quotes in combat. Haven't checked this latest update yet, but combat has always been a complete letdown, especially on foot. Your character starts putting down your weapon if you spend 1 second without firing. Once the animation starts, it will add considerable lag between your click/button press and it actually firing, which can make you miss shots very often during fights. Beating those orange drones never feel like any sort of challenge, just an annoying chore, especially when the repair ones start healing your target from very far away

Space combat is fine, but nothing to write home about. It's all about dogfights among small craft, which is much better than doing anything on foot. Freighters and corvettes exist solely as stationary space rocks with maybe some cargo you can blow up to steal.

I wouldn't say trading is even a secondary factor, much less important in any manner. It's just a crutch for players that don't accidentally stumble on an easy way to get boatloads of credits. Getting nanites can be a much bigger chore (I've set up a macro to turn in food in the Anomaly for nanites, since I was playing on permadeath, so mold->nanites wasn't feasible), quicksilver is even worse. A good chunk of my playtime was setting up active indium mining farms and uploading them in the hopes someone else could use the money, back before the price was nerfed down hard.

it is the best game available at what it does

Only at the "infinite* planets, infinite* universe" thing and seamless space to planet transition. It's not the best at ground combat, space combat, base building, ship building/customization, trading, crafting, storytelling, being a space pirate, space exploration, ground exploration... Of course, no other game offers all of these things in a single package, at least not that I'm aware of, but I can name some games that do some of those things better than NMS