It's definitely a quality project, especially considering it's a single dev.
Running an evacuation takes about 15 minutes. Then it's another 15 minutes to land on a planet and initiate colonization/find a planet.

Colonization itself is a bit of a mystery, but my impression was you could get by checking once a day.

To get anything marketable will take longer as you need to fully explore a planet before it can be sold, or bring a person to 100 percent happiness, or invent something new (complete mystery at this point). We don't know the duration at this point, whether it's days, weeks, or longer

Your cards get locked to an evacuation so your collection will determine how many you can run in parallel. You can run one per origin you own.

One key impression I have is it's a game first and play to earn second. It's deliberately being designed to rely on choices as opposed to mindlessly grinding.

Hope this (rather long typed on cell phone reply) helps!