The reason the autopilot sucks so much is due to the simplicity of it. There's a big pole sticking out of the direct front of your ship with a button on the end of it. If something presses that button, the ship rotates so many degrees, waits a small amount of time, then tries to return to course. If something gets close enough that the side of the button doesn't hit it, then the ship does. This only got much worse in X3 because a lot of things became bigger.
And the key of it, is that all of the X3 games are X2 with bigger ship models and slightly upgraded graphics code, some added audio, a new GUI and updated controls, and internal docking removed. I did a bit of basic modding for the game years ago and you'd be astounded at just how much of X2 is still packaged in X3.
Most amazing to me is how the sound system works. Go ahead and open up the game folder, then the "mov" folder. Inside, you can ask your favorite media player to open any of the large .dat files. Inside you'll find a good portion of the video sequences from all the games up to that point and the best part, 00144.dat: "44" is the code number for "English" used in the file structure, and in this twelve+ hour long audio file you'll find all of the spoken dialogue from the games including stuff that didn't get put in. This is part of the reason you'll get hiccups and weirdness when something voiced happens (especially on computers contemporary with the game) because the game is just told to play the bit of that huge file between XXXX and YYYY milliseconds. It's also why XRM got away with being able to have voiced names for all the ships it added (It added ships from Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. Irrelevant, but it makes me fangirl a lot.) because they were words Egosoft had the computer actress say just in case they'd need them someday. Note there's also the Soundtrack folder which has the exact files the game plays for all its music; there's a thread on the Egosoft forum that catalogues some of them.
I've spent thousands of hours playing everything since X2. So much so that I can't even compile a reasonable "here's my experiences" post. Vanilla, both X-Tended mods, XRM (which I even kinda got to contribute to, a little), and hundreds of other scripts and mods...I thrashed the poor thing like so many people do to Skyrim these days. And I can relate to the complexity; I got a disk copy of X2 along with the first video card I ever bought and I threw it away because I couldn't figure out how to do more than spin and shoot. Years later I finally invested the time (much more time, because I restarted with X3: Reunion and they kinda gave up on making decent manuals after X2) and now I'm a veritable master at a game nobody else ever really wants to learn about...
