Impressions after first few hours - tedious

So yeah, that's my impression after spending a few hours trying to get into this game, but bouncing off because the game is so tedious. It seems everything that made Terraria great fun is completely absent from Starbound, so, I'll start listing my many complaints:

1) Mining. It's nice that you can mine 9 blocks at once, but Christ it's still so tedious. Terraria's caves were huge, it was easy to find a couple of caves that would stretch almost the entire depth of the map, the whole map was filled with caves. I spend most of my time on Starbound just digging through rock because caves are both small and few. This is what made material hunting in Terraria good; you didn't have to mind-numbingly dig through rock for hours to find anything. And of course when you find anything it's yet another deposit of copper, silver and above being ridiculously rare.

2) Exploration. Or to put it more aptly, what exploration? In Terraria it felt as though there was something to see when exploring the map. I'd find a huge cave network, I'd find different biomes, getting deeper I'd find harder enemies. And all the while I'd be finding items of one sort or another. My reward for spending several hours exploring in Starbound currently is to see the blocks change colour and find another copper deposit...

3) Crafting. I have no idea how I'm supposed to progress right now. There are very few listed recipes and not so much as a hint about how to move on. The gear I have currently is nothing like good enough to beat the UFO and frankly I don't have the patience to spend another 6 hours trying to mine the silver I need for that armour set, not that it'll make a difference, my weapons won't do anything to it in any case. Oh and while I'm on the topic of crafting, what the **** is with making it require pixels to craft gear.

4) Combat. Pretty awful actually, controls don't feel responsive. Basic as Terraria's combat was, the controls were responsive and I always felt completely in control of my character. Combine this with zero enemy variety and combat is generally just boring.

I probably have more to moan about but it doesn't spring to mind right now. This game just feels like a step backwards in every department in the genre. Obviously some of this is due to it being early beta (though it looks more like an early alpha), but I can't help but feel Starbound has cracks running to its very core, a seeming lack of understanding of what makes a game like this good.