I've been feeling the same. There's a whole system with cargo links, fabricators, power generation, and tiers of extractors, but then nothing you can set up production for seems to have any purpose to mass-produce except setting up even more production.

There is one exception: manually mass-crafting components (on PC you can do 99 in one click) is a good way to farm XP and is a big resource sink. I've currently got an aluminum + iron setup to let me craft hundreds of thousands of adaptive frames, but I think the optimal setup, for most XP per click, would have cargo links shipping all the prerequisite components for an exotic component to one base (probably on Venus, for fastest time skipping [edit: cargo links work on playtime rather than UT time, unfortunately, so sleeping doesn't work]).

In terms of more intentional mechanics, something like being able to manufacture ammo (even if it took a lot of resources) would give it a purpose within the context of the rest of the game.