Something that I feel exacerbates Jeff's complaint of having no reason to settle down anywhere, is the abundance of planets. With a million different planets to choose from, all of which are mostly alike, you can just as easily jump from one place to another, skimming the surface, as you can just mining underneath your base. If you do end up building up one planet, you inevitably have to abandon your outpost in favor of higher yield planets in later sectors. With no way of keeping track of where you built and where you didn't, switching homes is a dangerous proposition, as you might not be able to return to your old home. I spent a ton of time on one alpha sector planet, building up a base, and mining as deep as I could. It yielded immense amounts of ore but if I want to go to sector beta, I have to abandon my work and change home planets.

Would anyone prefer if they limited the number of planets??

You can keep track of the coordinates of your planet if you want to build it up, or set it as your "Home Planet", or keep track of of multiple planets. Have a log detailing where you've gone and such. Something like that in-game is preferable to just cutting out a ton of planets.

The building stuff has never been a huge draw for me. I enjoy diggin and finding stuff and crafting better things, there's the combat and seeing the things other people have made that's left for me. If they could make the combat more interesting and make the dungeons more complicated and purposeful, it'd feel alot less aimless. But it's a beta, and they don't have the story and such in there yet, so maybe they've already got plans for more depth and direction.