I was a bit annoyed by photosynthesis not working as expected. In one of my first games, I used algae to create oxygen. However, this did not remove carbon dioxide, and the overall gas pressure in my base mysteriously kept increasing. I know it's not a physics simulator, but given the name of the game I expected a bit more realism around oxygen production.
Overall the game is a strange mix of physics sim and quirks that don't make sense. For example, industry produces heat and heat spreads as expected. Solid, liquid and gas phase changes happen more or less as expected, leading to fun stuff like steam explosions. But then heat can be deleted in unphysical ways, heat can't
be radiated away into space like in the real world etc.
The heat management is one of my biggest frustrations with the ONI gameplay loop. You go from gradually adding niceties to the base like lighting and plumbing to immediately needing some unholy water-cooled system that uses more power than the rest of the base combined, is stupid expensive in refined metals, and doesn't even permanently solve the problem because soon the heatsink waste pool is boiling and searing any dupe that walks past the general area. Oh and you have to do all this before the greenhouse gets slightly too warm and dooms the colony to starvation.
Heat management is super easy with aquatuner and steam turbine, you only need some steel and plastic, which are not so hard to get. Personally for me ONI heat-management is one of minor dissapointments, I think it would have been much more fun and deep if this system was more physically accurate.
Note that while they are both fun and share many features like logistic systems and machines, they are wildly different in approach.
Oxygen Not Included is an inherently unstable system, and it's a frantic race to juggle all the spinning plates while your colony falls more and more apart. The better you get at the game, the further you can stretch it before it succumbs to starvation, disease, lack of air or death by overheating.
Factorio (in regular mode) has a system that it is possible to keep stable at all times, and once you get a handle on the enemies you play the game at your own pace.
ONI has me super frustrated but without the challenge and success part. I reached the surface once when setting the map to super easy and discovered that there was nothing fun there, either. It's fun for a little bit to get things running, but you can't make it a closed loop system (at least at first) and you'll run out of stuff fairly soon. I thought that with enough research you'd get there, and you might, but the way of storing liquids or gases for processing, the heat it creates, the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface, the crappy power generation methods to pump it all around... I just didn't get that game. Factorio I played for thousands of hours and I'm still not tired of it.
In the planned DLC they plan to significantly rework space and introduce playable asteroids, so rockets will be use as a logistic system between your main base and space outposts.
On your other points, it looks like you simply haven't understood game systems deep enough.
>you'll run out of stuff fairly soon
Geysers can support really large bases and other materials you can get from space missions, which are powered either by oil wells or water geysers. It's a great simplification that you can built self-powering oxygen generators, which consume water and produce oxygen with some leftover hydrogen.
>the heat it creates
Aquatuners + steam turbine setup solves all heat issues. And you can cool metal refineries output directly inside steam rooms which power stem turbine (by using oil or petroleum for coolant).
>the meteors that destroy anything you put on the surface
Bunker doors + radars + a tiny bit of automation. I think that radar mechanics are unnecessary complex and not explained properly, but once you understand it, they are quite easy to use.
>the crappy power generation methods
Even without advanced sour gas/petroleum power setups it's really easy to get a TON of power generation. In mid and late game I usually sit on top of so much power generation and unfortunately game does not have any power sink game mechanics.
ONI is deeply frustrating if you have an understanding of thermodynamics. It doesn't map in any reasonable way onto actual physics. One of the main mechanisms for managing heat is a plant that destroys heat.
To me it feels incredibly hacky and ruins the game.
Overall the game is a strange mix of physics sim and quirks that don't make sense. For example, industry produces heat and heat spreads as expected. Solid, liquid and gas phase changes happen more or less as expected, leading to fun stuff like steam explosions. But then heat can be deleted in unphysical ways, heat can't be radiated away into space like in the real world etc.