Not really. The economy is being worked on so that lots of items have reduced value, and they are probably making a bunch of changes to loot. I'm working on a mod to reduce the amount of loot you get while the vendors have more and better items. I'm going to give some vendors (especially the space trader in the homestead) some extremely expensive, unique items so that gold will feel more useful.
But sadly for your current playthrough, there's not much to use the gold for. The economy is poorly balanced, and you are far from the only one who has found this to be a problem.
