I shouldn't be awake at 3 AM but I'm so excited that tonight's livestream ended in Starfield deciding to work, unlike for my past level 75 character who got softlocked, blocking me from completing the main quest and after trying to use console commands she got corrupted in a weird way where even in a universe (save) from before I used console commands the game still thought I did that. I can confirm that if you rush the main quest and don't do anything else you can definitely complete it, though I can't be sure if that works 100% of the time since I still have no earthly idea what caused the softlock to happen during that mission. with this character because I was focusing only on the main quest, I never went to Neon before All That Money Can Buy, I made a save prior to speaking to Walter in case the mission did fuck up at the end, then another save prior to entering the ship after the quest was done just for good luck, and this time around when I sat down on the cockpit the god damn quest flag decided to update, and Walter just initiated dialogue like he was supposed to do, it worked even as I got up from the chair, he gave me the shitty level locked reward gun and didn't keep me locked in dialogue with him for all eternity.
I dunno man, I still like Starfield but that experience just left a sour taste in my mouth, you have to basically pray the thing works as intended or else you're fucked and there are no workarounds that don't screw you over (like with achievements being disabled and your character being labeled as "modded" forever), so I'm not sure if I can recommend starfield to anyone until I know for certain this bug has been fixed for good. most recent threads from fellow unlucky people who experienced this softlock are from months ago but it happened to me recently with a character created during a beta period. maybe some freak bug related to the ships being inaccessible caused this quest to malfunction again, they do claim to have fixed this in previous updates, so who truly knows. Starfield is sorta worth it until it's not and it makes you lose dozens of hours of gameplay due to a bug.