The ability to create a disengagement opportunity by destroying part of the enemy fleet is probably my favourite new feature. If you get jumped by a much bigger fleet, if you're fast and vicious enough you can make a clean getaway, even if you can't kill the big boy ships. It makes for much fewer forced reloads due to messing up the sensor game or having a pirate armada be hyperspace-storm ping-ponged into your small smuggling operation.
Burn 10 Shrike is the best, I love it. Trolling around with a burn 10 fleet of Omens, Tempests, and Shrikes makes for a great early-game smuggling/piracy experience. When you including the ship price changes, the Shrike now has a very well defined niche and role: biggest fish in the smallest pool. The Shrike (P) is just better than the regular Shrike for most purposes. The only thing it's worse at is the Heavy Blaster + Sabot Pod build. I think it needs more of a downside compared to the regular Shrike, maybe slightly reduced base flux stats or shield efficiency?
Hazard really doesn't matter anymore. The conditions that make a good colonization system have drastically changed; in 0.9.1 you wanted multiple low-hazard planets in one system, now you just want all resources in a system with as many planets as possible. Even 200% hazard no-resource rockballs can make good forge-worlds with heavy industry, refining, fuel production, and a military base, provided you have the in-faction resource supply to halve their upkeep costs. I like it; it now makes sense why Sindria exists, and the Dictat's choice to not just move the Synchrotron Core to Volturn is a reasonable one. The industry limit and high structure costs mean that vanilla markets make a lot more sense in general.
I'm not sure the AI core droprate from the Nexus are high enough. I've blown up 2 so far, one degraded, one full, and got 2 Alphas from the degraded, 1 Alpha 1 Beta from the full. Farming the infinite Remnant fleets is always going to be better value long-term, but you can get 1-2 cores from a single Ordo.
AI cores being way more common makes getting into the colony game without skills perhaps a bit too easy. On the other hand, you then have to deal with Pathers and AI inspection fleets in order to stay in the colony game. On the third hand, you're going to have to deal with Pathers either way, and building Combat rather than Industry makes dealing with both problems easier. Cores are great even if you invest heavily into colony skills, so you're tempted to deal with inspection fleets anyway.
The Prometheus Mk2's statcard says it has 3 medium ballistics, but it only has 2.
The Harbinger needed the nerf, and it's still amazing. 3 Phase Lance Harbinger is a terror to anything cruiser sized or below. Low tech gets ruined by pure soft flux pressure, mid-tech has less trouble with the amount of soft flux but also always has exposed engines, and nothing high-tech can deal with having their shields or phase system disabled for a triple phase lance burst straight to the hull. It's also really good for fighting high-tech stations, regular or remnant. A combat-specced Harbinger can take out a Remnant station shield module with 3 triple phase lance bursts, matching up nicely with the 3 stored charges of the QD system. 1 Heavy Blaster 2 Ion Pulser Harbinger can cripple any ship right through the shields, and still take out smaller threats and other phase ships with the Blaster.
If Commerce takes up an Industry slot, there's literally zero reason to ever build more than one of it. Maybe you build one just so you have a convenient place to dump all your salvage loot and survey data but that's not how you get the best money for it. If you actually care about getting money for your salvage, you sell it where there are shortages and mix in some black market trading. Maybe you build one so you can just buy tankers and freighters without having to custom order them, but that's still just a convenience thing. Commerce needs to do something else, something that the player needs or really wants, otherwise there's no reason to build it.