This is a vote for the middle.
Just spent 5 hours today (Saturday). First hour was trying to learn the interface. After the fifth hour, game crashed to desktop killing the immersion that had sucked me in. Hard to get excited going back to the last autosave...
For a Space 4x, this one seems well fleshed out with continuous different alien lore in the time I have played.
Checking the developers updates, theyre doing a lot of free updates without putting it behind a paywall. That in itself is commendable.

Edit. Crashes to desktop can be from several hours. And tonight I had a crash within 15 minutes of playing.