I feel the same way. Being stuck in darkness until you're forced to do missions and advance the plot makes the open world stagnant and less fun to roam around in. It feels like an artist trying to force their aesthetic on the gamer rather than make things actually fun.
Maybe it could be changed in an upgrade. I think you said in one of your posts that the upgrade system works by, when you gain xp, you are better able to take advantage of loopholes in the virtual simulation code to give yourself powers and stuff like that. Maybe one of the upgrades could be hacking the weather and day/night cycle to be more normal.
I don't think it would be too much work to just implement SRTT's system again right? I dunno, I haven't played the game and maybe people will just get used to it, but I think it could get annoying pretty fast. And for an open world game where you could conceivably spend 100+ hours on just messing around, that's a long time to be annoyed.