I'm really enjoying this game - like really enjoying it. The premise is fun, and it feels like the way the game works is doing the relevant concepts justice in really fun ways. Unfortunately, the amount of layers to the game's RNG feels like it's a bit too far. On top of just having too many layers on the RNG, the randomness feels too heavy in the early game (but also like it ramps up too fast into the mid-game as your crew levels up).

On that latter point, I wish the baseline for most checks was in the 70-80% range instead of being a consistent 50% for most things.

When your best of the best "expert" doctor who's famous for their work in the medical field, is basically tossing a coin to see if they can figure out how to treat normal human medical troubles using the appropriate medical tools for the job, that feels like the game being arbitrarily harsh instead of punishing in a plausible and thematic way. This could be further benefited by more nuanced modifiers for the various types of "injuries" your crew can experience. The "depressed" modifier could have a -5% modifier per level on events which require physical exertion, while physical injuries would have the full -10% but only reduce your effectiveness at say, analysing radiation data, by -5% instead of everything always being -10% for every level of any injury you've suffered. These people are supposed to be the most capable experts the planet has to offer, so adding some weight to their abilities - at least when dealing with familiar problems - makes sense. Save the 50% baseline for challenges that are uniquely alien and unfamiliar.

Alongside this, you could shift the progression system in the opposite direction to make it feel less like you jump from underpowered in the beginning to overpowered in the midgame, by turning those per-level modifiers down from +5% to +2% or maybe even +1% per level. You're already one of the world's foremost experts on a subject, so while you're always going to have room to grow, it's not going to be these huge leaps into excess. If you stop feeling like your expert doctor is struggling to treat a sprained ankle, you shouldn't feel like the girl with only 3 missions under her belt has jumped from coinflip-level medical skills to having a 95% chance of curing alien diseases nobody has ever encountered before.

The bigger problem is the layers on layers on layers of RNG though. And there are numerous examples where it becomes awkward for various reasons.

Sometimes, you'll just fly to a planet, and the RNG will throw "and one of your crew members geets bashed against the wall along the way" for no apparent reason. Then you check out the ring system around the planet "and the same crew member gets smashed against the wall again" because RNG, then you land to investigate the planet "congrats the universe decided that crew member in particular was hated and is now dead" because you dared to try and actually play the game. I've had this happen 4 separate times across only 3 runs in the game, with that exact pattern. I fly to a planet, a crew member gets injured, check out something in orbit, the same crew member gets injured again, land on the planet, and the crew member dies, just from one step along a small part of a journey in one system. My third "playthrough" ended in the first system - as we were reaching the gate to head back home with the ship at 1/3 condition because the last planet I visited arbitrarily damaged the ship twice with no choices I could have made to even try and influence the damage, then I got bad luck on a 55% roll to try not to blow the ship up on the way back through the gate.  The odds of random events feels too high, the odds of the event being negative feels too high, the odds of it being an event where you have no agency in what happens as a result of the event feels too high, the odds of the same event occuring 3+ times in a row on back-to-back checks where the event can happen repeatedly feels too high, and the odds of the same crew member being picked for the repeat injury feels too high. All of these layers of RNG within a single event that just tells the player "btw your crew member gets hurt for reasons you have no control over" then "and again to the same person" and "oh they died this time because screw that one crew member in particular" gets to be a bit much when I've seen it happen as often as I've seen "game over" screens.

Another area where the layered RNG becomes awkward is the location generation. You get a handful of systems to visit with each trip through the gate. The odds of getting a system with extinct life aren't super high. The odds of getting a system with current life are even lower. The odds of getting a system which has been visited by anotehr civilisation are pretty low as well. The odds of running into an existing intelligent species are super low. Finding sources for xenology research is fairly rare. Finding sources which give you meaningful amounts even moreso. You need xenology research for mission-critical things, but also for hiring multiple crew types, as well as for several critical research options which make it plausible (though still heavily RNG-reliant) for you to get more xenology research going forward. In my second run, I got to my 10th gate, and hadn't even gathered enough xenology research to complete a single R&R project with. It ws partly because I had to spend a bunch of that on new crew members along the way, but even without that, I'd have barely been able to afford the first research project after my 9th mission, which feels way too late to be a viable starting point for that process.  

There are multiple scenarios where a handful of bad RNG rolls (with odds skewed in favour of those bad rolls happening) can screw the player's run, and there's no way they could have prepared for it or compensated for it or played better to avoid it. I'm not against losing crew sometimes. I'm not against the game being hard, either. But I feel like it's built to be unfair in ways that feel frustration-inducing instead of tension-inducing in its current state, especially in the early game. Meanwhile, even midgame, if you don't get screwed by RNG early, it starts feeling like there's not enough tension any more, except in that you're sometimes just not being given a chance to make any progress because of the RNG not even giving you a chance at finding the resources you need to advance.