i just hit 300 hours in ED, so i guess i could weigh in on my experience with it and you could decide if it's for you or not. if you have questions on anything feel free to ask or hmu on steam
hereso starting off in elite is probably the most difficult of things. there are a lot of keybinds and piloting is not easy with a keyboard at first, it feels unnatural (but i've gotten really proficient with it, after binding a few extra utilities.) the tutorials are "okay" now that they redid them but they miss a lot of points and teaching players things for more comfortable flying. if you practice doing missions and combat at nav beacons in solo at the starting area systems you should have a fair grip on how to do things. making money is obviously what you have to do to progress, and a lot of the big grinds for money have been nerfed to stuff recently. that being said, it's still possible to make money and have fun, you dont have to be making profits of 20,000,000 at a time to have fun. i've been playing a lot with a friend who's new and combat in this game really clicked for him, so i've been winging up with him and bounty hunting with him a lot. we pull probably 500k to 700k per run. to put that into perspective, the ship he just recently got after 50 hours of gameplay is considered to be a great bounty hunting ship (the vulture) and cost him about 5 mil to buy and 2 mil to outfit decently.
this game has a lot of niches for what you want to do. there's no "endgame," you simply find something fun to do and you do that. since you said you're looking for a rich multiplayer experience that's a bit of a weakpoint but powerplay is being changed around a bit to be fun again so i'll explain that a bit. theres 10 or so big factions in the game that players can join (or not at all, if you wish) and work for. each faction controls a chunk of human inhabited space and the controlled areas are influenced by player actions in each system. different factions require players to do different things to promote the expansion of their controlled areas. some require you to engage in combat, some require you to trade or finance in other systems. tbh it's a lot of fun to get involved with the people who love powerplay, group up with them and have community efforts to turn the tide in a faction war.
multiplayer in this game is extremely reliant on you finding a community somewhere online to get involved with, because it's rare for you to find people in open play that will interact with you at all.
inara has an entire section of their site dedicated to posting wings and getting players hooked up with them to play. they're a lot of fun to get involved with, a lot do combat but there's also community organized "expeditions" to explore certain parts of space which are really awesome. the community for this game as a whole is one of the nicest i've participated in
anyways i wrote a lot and i dont like making walls of text so if you got any questions like i said just ask
