When the twitch feed says dreaming we get a screenshot of NMS. So, is intance16status Emily?
Are the sentinels her way of protecting the simulation/dream? Is NMS her dream? Is it a simulation of what will be?
ooc: This was also a nice way for Sean to remove himself from the front-man of marketing, now Emily can do it. “Come become an echo and join my dream.”
I think your spot on about NMS being not just a simulation but a dream of the sentient AI Emily/Loop16. An answer to Asimov’s electric sheep question if you will.
The sentinels are even more of a mystery now, was it Emily her self who brought them into existence? or the creation of sentient beings within the dream? or from something or somewhere else…
edit - The dream also explains why she has taken on the Atlas persona in game, if she wakes up the dream is gone, so Emily/Loop16/Atlas can never wake 
It seems like the Sentinels are more sinister than we originally knew. Reading some of the logs in the WK console makes them seem like a malevolent force rather than the simple “eco robots” we were led to believe.
Perhaps, the sentinels were not part of Loop16’s simulation but were virus from Atlas foundation to take down the simulation, and later hacked by Loop16 to protect the simulation.
Could be, could be. Although before Emily became awake, Loop 16 had already diagnosed that we are living in a simulation.
Couple that with some of the early questions “Is it possible for a simulation to contain more complexity than itself?”, and it raises the possibility that Emily is going to create a new simulation, in order to break us out of the simulation we’re already in.
Convoluted, I know. but it makes some sort of sense to me.