I’m not surprised they haven’t figured out how to have it be a natural impulse yet.

They probably have, but decided to not bother, "too much work" involved. I mean, I can easily think of many ways to make outposts something players would look forward to mechanically:

• outpost can create a trade route to a city, lowering prices of certain goods there and/or making new goods appear on the vendors. Making this increase vendors' credit stock alone would make most players create at least one outpost.
• remove outpost engineering skill, let the player buy blueprints to learn new stuff AND also allow the player to buy prefab from vendors, or let the player hire a construction crew to build some stuff instead, such that, when you arrive at the outpost, you'll see their ship and have X of the bought stuff "in stock" to place "for free"
• make the research aspect happen in a crewed outpost with a research lab. Let the npc create an activity/side quest asking for the components. Adding to this, let the player buy stuff and ask it to be delivered to an outpost for a fee, or have a new NPC that is basically a space trucker to make deliveries to your outposts.