I'm here to jump on this bandwagon. I hope ya'll don't mind.
I'll not be buying any DLC until some basics are covered.
-repair turrets/fighters do not autofire on damaged friendlies. Literally useless unless managed directly by the player.
- You cannot commission a specific ship from the workshop @ a shipyard. having to do 50 extra clicks is annoying & finding enough crew after "upgrading" to the intended layout is a huge drag
-the player cannot build any basic function stations. We need to be able to refine our own freaking ore & have our own repair docks/ shipyards. Turret, fighter, and torpedo production shouldn't be restricted to AI factions, either.
-The "new station" fee is ridiculous. 10m credits to found a station from an already existing ship in an un-owned sector? Who am I paying & what exactly am I buying? Considering it will take about 100 in game hours for said station to actually turn a profit it seems to me that IRL it costs more to run my computer than it cost to buy the game.
- Manual aiming of turrets. with a variety of weapons equipped (lasers & machine guns, for example) you cannot hit your target with both simultaneously. The "target lead" necessity for MG turrets seems to be completely ignored. you can compensate as the player by leading manually, but that causes laser turrets to fire into empty space. The end result is that manual-aimed turrets are 100% useless. Auto-aiming turrets being stapled with the 50% damage reduction is just an insult to injury considering that all AI-owned turrets do not have this limitation. They ARE aimed by the AI and do not have a damage reduction applied.
- AI ships cannot be ordered to dock at a station for the purpose of transferring wares/crew/fighters or buying equipment. All of this must be done manually. Transporters ease this eventually but make the beginning of the game much more annoying than it needs to be & provides a huge grind-wall. (You've gotta buy transporter software for ~3mill credits for each ship, not to mention traversing 1/2 the galaxy to find Xanion. Still have to pilot a ship to transfer crew/ wares after all this.) As a "fleet commander" style game, having to manually pilot every single one of my ships is counter intuitive. A Navy admiral doesn't manage the manning of ships directly like this.
-Saving turret blueprint configurations: By this, I mean that a workshop design should have it's turret blueprints saved to (as a part of) it's design. So, as the player, I wouldn't have to manually find the authors turret's and apply them directly to 10-15 turret hard-points on each of my 10-20 ships. I can understand the necessity of the player installing the actual turret equipment, but the cosmetic aspect needs to be less "600 clicks per ship" just to get it to where the author intended for it to be.