A common complaint people make about #SpaceOpera is that planets always feel so tiny and have only as much going on on them as in a small town at best.
But I think that's an automatic consequence of the most basic premises of this genre. When fairly ordinary people can have a space ship and just take off to leave the star system in 30 minutes, then every point anywhere on the planet can be reached in 10.
Distances on a planetary scale cease to exist. Everything is right next door.