You bring up some interesting points about exploration. I struggle with it for taxinaut as well. But I hope by keeping the focus smaller (e.g. you generally don't discover unknown empires/races but instead some sleezy joint where they traffic clones) that I don't build a world that's too big/epic in scope to do anything with. (I think Star Wars shows this as well: It looks like it's a rich world you could do a whole lot with but it's really quite limited in a way (The more successful spin-offs like the mandelorian go smaller instead of bigger with the story scope).
I looked at your game-page it looks like something I would like to play if it was fleshed out. I would definitely stick with it.
I have some text based projects lying around myself but I'm commited to TAXINAUT now. In one of those projects a sense of travel was added by making it take time to reach a place and places would be hierarchical (like a directory structure). Each place is still a room with points you can travel to but each point would have a name and a travel-time on it. Travelling would also reveal other travel points in the same room...it's a bit of typing to explain the full system here but it worked pretty well and gave a better sense of place then the normal big cluster of rooms way of doing this. For example: your location would be something like:
Forgotten lands/Emerald forest/High Eldor/Market square/Pan's House
While in "Pan's House" you can see the travel-points in there (e.g. bed-room, kitchen, storage-room). These will take a few seconds of travel time. You can exit Pan's house and be back in the market-square which shows travel-points (Pan's House, Jobe's House, Abe's Jewelry, etc.) and these will take maybe a minute of travel-time (not real time of course). I should have used a sci-fi/space example instead of a fantasy-rpg but you probably get the drift (e.g. Oberon Sector/Antares B/Alderan/Keppler's Moon/Orbit).
You can just send me your ideas for your character by email (mosgrom@mosgrom.net) or (I saw you followed me on twitter) maybe through twitter direct-message. I don't think itch has direct messaging.