Devs can for sure handhold their players, but I think that, in a game with actual gaming mechanics, it's also fair to expect a bare minimum of exploration and trial willingness from those players. Like, you know, letting them play around a bit to see if they can find some optimal by themselves. And there's the game lacking some helping elements, and there's the player not paying attention to what is actually there.
Negative credits are a result of your investment in the mining ship and buying out Maeve's contract, as explained in the story (you have to pay the Marv Corp for the fuel on a daily basis, but Alexia managed to stop payments for a week so you could get enough money for Maeve and the ship, and now you have to pay back that week's fuel). Getting positive numbers will help you to add new improvements and mineral refining systems, but as Krog said there's no point in getting there just yet because the station was still relying on the emergency power source. That power issue is fixed at the end of the current story content so I guess the new update will bring those elements on in a way that makes sense story-wise, like in 'ok, now we have the main power source running so we can afford to buy the refining system and some extra storage bins for the ore, as long as we have the financial side sorted out'.
Re: mining, in the planet selection screen, you can read which mineral can be found on each planet, as well as its expected quality and depth. Once you start mining, you get actual data that is added to that screen, so the next day you go mining and select the same planet, you can compare the expected results to what you are actually getting from your mine; as Maeve and Krog explained during the mining briefing, quality slowly drops as you keep extracting from the same site, so when you see a significant difference in terms of quality between expected and actual data, you'll know it's time to look for new mining sites. And you can always check prices first with Alexia to decide which mineral to extract. She's the one with all the financial data: fueling basically runs automatically, getting a tiny daily profit, and we'll be getting more income by opening the new gates and the increased traffic this means, while the trading agreements for the minerals will start to play out in the next update (the trading companies' representatives said they need some time to adjust routes). The import/buying mineral system is already in place, as well as the refining and manufacturing ones, just disabled as those pieces of the story are still to be told. You can't just get your station working at full throttle at this point; as almost every character points out, you're basically a newcomer and things take time, you need to build your reputation in the sector first and even fix the station itself, so everything is advancing slowly.
Other elements like Callisto's TV only appeared when there was something important actually happening in the game's story. I don't know if there's something similar planned out for Stellar Crossroads but, if it is, it's easy to assume it would show up in a similar way. An event tracker, again, is not necessary at this point of the story as we don't even know if there'll be side quests as in Callisto at all, so it's pointless to ask about it until those quests are actually implemented, if ever. Also, wouldn't the game feel even more 'desert' if all those elements were already in place and accessible but totally empty of content? It seems obvious to me that Xavster has decided to slowly build up those extra things, implementing them accordingly to the story development and not throwing them in as a technical update just to show how they'll work (or, as in Callisto, making the game more player-friendly in retrospective, so players getting on board on later updates had it easier to get the same content than those who played older versions). This way every player will get the same feel of progression regardless of when they start playing, and I think that's a quite good choice.
