There is a way to make planets and sizes more realistic an beautiful without lowering player interaction or the necessity for reballancing. I read it somewhere on this forum:
Rescale all ships and stations to half size. Make all weapons speed double size to compensate without need for combat reballancing.
Reduce thruster and normall speed to half, keep cruise speed and trade lane speed as is.
Keep asteroid sizes as is.
Keep sensor and chat ranges as is.
Halve all prices.
Result:
Planets and systems appear larger, you see just as many players, travel with cruise and lanes will not take longer. Combat will appear unchanged, just the outside universe larger, and cruise and lane speed faster compared to combat speed. It will be easier for all ships to not bump into asteroids. It will be harder for people to escape any siutation by just shieldrunning to a base even if its 20 k away. Because of the smaller ship size, NPC collisions will also happen less frequently. Characters can store double the money before becoming corrupt. More expensive equipment will be possible.
A better universe all in all.
All you need is a way to rescale these things with a single program, without having to do everything manually.