I'm not normally that into life sims, but I enjoyed your dev diary series so I figured I'd give this a try.
I think my biggest issue so far is that you can't talk to any of the NPCs. I kept pressing the interact button on reflex to talk to shopkeepers and the like, and was disappointed when nothing happened. It makes the NPCs feel like cardboard cutouts rather than people. The dialogue in the story scenes was really great, so I'd love to see more of it.
The other thing is that the game kinda has the roguelike problem of every area feeling samey. Inhabited and uninhabited planets each look basically the same to one another. Since the main draw of the game is the environments and inhabitants, I'd like to see more variety there, get to see all the weird alien species and architecture in the galaxy and such.
Minor issues: It wasn't clear to me how the job time limits worked. What constitutes a "cycle"? I think the bars in the lower left correspond to job timers, but that could do with clearer indication. I also wasn't initially clear where the "shipyard" for upgrading the ship was, since that computer is towards the edge of the screen and usually covered up by GUI elements, plus there is another computer terminal at loading docks that I assumed covered everything. Maybe stick both the "expected deliveries" and the upgrade terminal together?
And while I know you want to lock off the story content for the demo, I think it might be nice to at least give us the initial hook. You said in your videos that the protagonist's actions in the tutorial have some relation to the appearance of the cosmic egg and that motivates them to investigate; it would be cool to see what that relation is, as a hook to get demo players interested in the main story. As it is there's not much indication that there is going to be a main story at all.
I liked the personality matrix idea. I agree with your assessment that forcing the player to make dialogue choices for every line is just tedious, and I think this is a great compromise. I think it also adds mystery to the game, in that unlike in a dialogue tree scenario you don't know what all the possible dialogue branches are.
I had no idea the biscuit dispensary wasn't a core feature (since 0.1.8 was my first version), but I think it works great.