There's just even more menus to grind now, and none of the other recently added roadblocks on the way to fun has been removed. Meanwhile elements of the core combat gameplay that have been in dire need of change for years have not been touched at all. The space battlefield is still constrained by an artificial box, the AI is still inhumanly perfect when it comes to things like timing phase cloak or shields but at the same time is perfectly happy to park a friendly frigate right between your ship's guns and an enemy you're shooting at, there's still no way of giving more nuanced fleet-wide orders than "full assault" and "full retreat" (maybe something along the lines of "hey guys, we're outnumbered three to one, maybe stick together instead of suiciding into the enemy fleet one by one"), the HUD colors of enemies and allies are still extremely similar, it's still difficult to tell friendly missiles from enemy ones, and I could go on for some time like this.
The new combat things sure sound nice and all, but I'd happily trade all of those for a fix to even one of the issues mentioned above. I get that's never going to happen; adding new features is a lot more exciting than going back and overhauling old ones that are "good enough". But I'm never going to stop being unhappy about it either.
Edit: Also, are you supposed to be able to recover ships that broke into pieces during the battle?