I can't say for others, but I like spacesims like the oldschool Elite, Wing Commander, Privateer, Escape Velocity etc... Where you are in the thick of action, trading, exploring, smuggling etc. Not one where I just build rockets and launch, watch it unfold.. it's just not my type of game, but I know how popular it is elsewhere.

I definitely wish there were more games with realistic orbital mechanics.  I really like KSP, but I also find it to be filled with frustrations.  First of all, even though I love the idea of being able to create my own ships, I've never met an editor for doing this that I liked.  Building simple ships in KSP is fine, building more complicated ones is painful.  Second, KSP doesn't allow anywhere near as much flexibility as I'd like for planning missions ahead of time.

So yeah, I guess for those reasons I've never been quite as taken with it as the games Halfgeek mentioned.  I love realistic physics, but KSP, even though I'm really happy it exists and think it was definitely worth buying, doesn't allow me to have quite as much fun with it as I'd like.  (By the way, orbital transfer even in version 1.0 is still extremely wonky.  I kind of wish they would do 3 body simulations.)

Why is it that Kerbal Space Program gets so little love around here?

 

Seems very odd to me.

Simple answer is that no one bothers to post about it.