I've been playing KSP1 since like ye olden betas. Usually, especially after the addition of science and then career mode, my gameplay looked like: Grab the latest set of 'must have' mods, start a game, build up tech stack. A flight out to Minmus takes 7 days? that's like 7 Mun missions I can run in the meantime. etc. The idea of time-warping for days or months and not doing some productive missions in the meantime seemed so inefficient.

This, in turn, led to games that were highly dependent on alarm clocks and a good mental model of all the active missions at a time, and it also meant I was spending real-world hours doing stuff "waiting" for a transfer window. I would then get bored of it, and stop playing before I made any missions out of the Kerbin system. When I would return months later, I wouldn't remember all the missions I had running, so I'd just start the cycle over again, a new career from scratch.

KSP2, so far, has really forced me to change how I play and actually get out of system. At first I was frustrated by how few biomes are on Mun and Minmus, presenting little opportunity to fill out the tech tree in the Kerbin system itself. But now I'm realizing that like "I've beat that level, and I don't need to keep replaying it." Now I'm 'forced' to take missions to Duna to get science, and that may mean warping a year or whatever for the next transfer window, but... that's okay. It's actually forcing me to go out and explore more.

Some people can really get the value out of the sandbox mode, and that's great it's still there for them, but the constraints of an actual gameplay loop force me to try new things and explore in a meaningful way. I think it's something the team has talked about a lot in their philosophy of KSP2, using the game's mechanisms to guide players to do things rather than leaving it quite as open ended as the first game was. And I think, so far, they've done an excellent job with the balance.

Also, side note: I really love that the main secret locations are guided missions. I am always conflicted about 'metagaming' secret locations, so it's nice to have some means, in-game, to explore some of these places. I did like that the KSP1 ScanSat mod would highlight secret locations, that felt like a reasonable in-game balance; you had to do some specialized mission (scanning the planet) to be able to get the information to then know where to direct a flight and still have to land/fly/drive to it. It'd be neat to see something similar in the Orbital Survey mod, in time. Or to have scanning baked into the game, which is a whole separate post.