I've been playing the beta since the first wave of invites. Game's good, has potential to be even better than AC ever was as long as they don't fuck it up. That's the concern though, I think gacha would ruin this game tbqh fam.
>you naturally encounter new neighbors through starsea voyages, where they have entire islets designed around them
Ripping this out to make a character gacha wouldn't feel right. On top of that, there will likely be a hard limit to how many neighbors you can have on your planet, just like there's a limit to how many villagers you can have in AC. There's only so much space, after all, and continuously expanding the usable land isn't realistic from a scalability perspective.
There's no combat, so people won't pull characters for that. No in-depth dating system, so that's not a draw either, and even if there was, the characters being chibi furries limits their appeal for that tactic.
Overall, character gacha just doesn't make sense for many other small reasons I'm not gonna bother to list.
Cosmetics? Maybe. I can see clothing/furniture gacha being a thing. But I'm thinking their monetization is actually gonna rely on the rotating daily shop that is already present in the beta. There's a limited amount of grindable currency to buy stuff from it, and the only other source is dailies. You also use this same currency to buy batteries for voyages, which is how you progress and find new materials, creatures, and neighbors that don't naturally spawn on your planet.
So I'm thinking they're just gonna sell this currency and that this won't be a gacha at all. At least, I can hope so.