Right.
In the interest of clarity (and because my own brand of lightheartedness doesn't always communicate well on message boards) I am attempting to make two points:
1.) I do not wish to sacrifice balance or fun in the name of complexity and realism. A lot of what I see debated on these forums is placing a heavy emphasis on "realism," which makes me slightly worried that the end result will be less fun. There is a balance to be struck here, but first and foremost this is a "game."
For instance, I find the idea of sleek, fast, yet devastating vaguely plane-shaped space fighters to be "fun," opening up new strategies and avenues of attack while making people make loadout decisions to deal with them. Yet, these fighters are hardly "realistic." Also, I enjoy the possibility that, for instance, low-tech ships would be balanced and able to stand up to high-tech ones, even though this doesn't always work out in the real world. It makes for good gameplay.
2.) This gets into my second point. Too many rules and too many systems can get in the way of enjoyment of the gameplay. I've played a few tabletop wargames and more than a few indie games that fell off the deep end in this regard.
It creates a fantastically steep learning curve that makes it very difficult for people to get into the game, and (more importantly right now) can divide up development time. Plus, it can be just unwieldy.
Really, I'm not "against" ground combat. I just think it's hardly a priority in a game that's so heavily based on space combat, and I would much rather see said space combat be the absolute best and most fun it can be before tacking on additional systems and complexity.