In another game, we called that Mass Effect.
I’m sure everyone would love if every scene had context, buildup and was 5 minutes long each. If they did though, this would still be in development, and undoubtedly people would be complaining about them milking the product (not that people didn’t already do that with its dev time anyway).
You can easily label pandora as all the fun stuff they got up in the time in-between the story missions. The story mentions weeks alone just for Killi’s recruitment quest, so much time goes by during the main storyline.