Can there be missions that require planetside/vehicle-only stuff? What are their thoughts on this?

Gareth says that, interestingly, in the Pacheco mission you're given a vehicle (she's one of the mission givers from Area18 on ArcCorp), so his current thoughts are similar - that a company could want the Player(s) to retrieve X resources for them and return it using their vehicle. Other methods could strongly encourage the Player to use a certain type of ship, but that's dangerous because Players could want to use their own ship, and Luke comments saying that they've heard people say that about the Pacheco mission, and that it's completely understandable. The reason they haven't done more missions with vehicle restrictions is because people can just cheat and use their own ships - ground vehicles are also slower, so they'd have to force Players to use them, which they don't want to do because then it'd be arbitrary and they want things to be contextual. When things like weather come online, that will force you to drive instead (a good example of this is the "Homestead" demo, which showed atmospheric disturbance forcing the Player to land their Connie and use the URSA Rover to get to their objective instead). Some caves will have entrances big enough for vehicles to enter, and because they're typically small, enclosed spaces, it'd be much smarter to take a vehicle inside than a ship. So they don't want their missions to be contrived, but instead to create situations where it makes sense to do things one way or another (arguably this could also create situations where, if you're a smart-arse, you could find a way to still use your ship in a situation where it's not really ideal, and reap the benefits of that intuitive solution - or just crash and make yourself look like a total idiot, in which case I'd hope you were recording so we can all watch and laugh).