In some sense Red Thought expresses what is my worry too: KSP has a huge potential to be an awesome game. But as it stands right now it is a great construction and physics simulation - game part is totally missing and it seems that SQUAD isn't very interested in developing it.
One thing I'm complaining about is lack of "in game motivation" - I mean by it "what is motivation for kerbals" not what is players motivation. I'm not into Civ-like winning conditions, so I think DontStarve-like check_your_resourses, don't_take_too_much_risks approach is better, but both are possible. So actually I dream that SQUAD would somehow merge with Klei and let them make the game part.
But SQUAD has decided to relay on modders ...
with DLC they gave modders at least some tools to fix this.
As a new player (ca 250h not visited any planet yet, too much hassle with the moons), I would like that someone made one huge in-game tutorial which would drag a player through every aspect of the game (I have no idea what the Kerbnet is) and maybe made some parallels with Earth space exploration or had some other storyline.
One example of lack of game intrinsic motivation is how science works: if you take temperature reading in vacuum then the game says that you are an i***t and then gives you science points :-P. And is there any meaningful difference between science instruments? I haven't found that out yet.
Still, I think missions are step in right direction. But without some general goal (avoiding destruction of Kerbal by asteroid; finding space Kraken; colonizing Mars) they do not help much.
So those where my thoughts, sry for bad english, greetings to SQUAD (and others) from Estonia and I hope SQUAD proves my assumption about their disinterest to be wrong.