I’m sure there are a lot of people that wouldn’t consider just flying around, exploring, and doing the current missions a game, but you could say something similar about early Minecraft. In sure some didn’t see the point without more structure or features, but that didn’t stop them from enjoying what was there and looking forward to the future
Early Minecraft was made by a single person and was in development for 2 years before it released (and had a fully playable game loop even before then).
SC has $700 million dollars, hundreds of devs and still hasn’t released anything as feature rich or playable as MC in 12 years. It’s fair for people to expect more at this point
I’m not comparing their scale, just the ability to enjoy something without it seeming like there’s much there to others. But if you want to compare, I was imagining MC back before even the Nether. I had plenty of fun just mining and stacking blocks to build whatever, nothing like what became available toward 1.0. SC is kind of in the same situation, but their timeline is just 20x greater because of the scope.