I guess I played it differently than you.
I played with a friend until I could afford my own ship with in game currency. Did whatever missions I enjoyed playing to the point they started paying out pretty good. Bought more ships with in game currency.
I never cared about what is OP, but I also don’t care about pvp so there’s that.
If you want to try any ship, either rent them, wait for ies or whatever its called, or ask random strangers.
I believe it’s called playing the game.
When you start a racing game, do you start with the best cars unlocked or do you play the game to earn them? This is the same, you can do bounties by yourself with the arrow but it’s going to take much longer than doing high level bounties or other missions as part of a crew.
I’ll put my two cents in. I never bought the game because of the invasive anti cheat. I was still tempted until they required PlayStation account linking.
I didn’t get it initially because it looked very repetitive and cheesy (in a bad way). Some of my friends played it which made me look into it and by the time I may have gave in and tried it they introduced account linking and I full noped out of it.
I use mine all the time. I use it to play games and watch TV/movies through my computer. I plan on using it for my kids account because games are so much cheaper on PC and have support forever.
I can plug any of my controllers in or m&k and have zero issues doing whatever I want.
It’s a shame it died so quickly.
This is just the beginning of a yearly subscription for Windows OS. Just wait.