Default ship controls are still A-D to turn, right? It's almost impossible to play that way; turn-to-cursor should be the default.
For most omni-shielded ships, it's good to at least occasionally rely on tank controls to control movement and shields independently. I do this even on Tempest, sometimes.
I could play using tank controls. It would suck, but I could do it. That's not the problem, the problem I see is it's the default. How many new players are being lost because they don't realize turn-to-cursor is an option?
To be fair tho, I skipped the tutorial lol that's on me. They felt natural to me, like an FPS. Although I couldn't figure out how to do a lot of things on my own (Like the teleporting thing the autopilot would do for me). And I always found the autopilot/ai always managed the flux better than I could.... It could teleport away and vent, but I never did figure out how to do that. Beyond just the teleporting, I always felt slower than the same ship on autopilot... Especially if I had to rapidly change course, it felt like I was stopping a train.
You can't please everyone 'cause if you made even a basic tutorial mandatory, people would likely complain about that instead lol. I'm really impressed with the balance this game strikes, 'cause I never felt punished for playing the way I played.
To put my play experience another way... I don't think the controls are an issue per se, but a lot of the other mechanics make a lot more sense now. It's a major perspective shift, though.. Some players will have a player-centric perspective so the ships in their fleet and even their ship itself is to aid the player. I guess the rest all flows from that naturally, too (The limitations on your colony's ability to become fully self-sufficient and grow without limitation etc... As it would render a player-centric perspective moot).
But I had the perspective from the tactical map, with my ship on autopilot. The ship meant nothing to me, it was just another ship in my fleet lol. So then you see the game from a very different perspective (Ships are just meta at this point, right? All I cared about were very specific stats like the ship's deployment points, movement speed (To quickly take the beacons for more deployment points lol), time to kill and combat rating (If their combat rating's too low, the ttk drops off a cliff very quickly in large battles and esp. in repeated battles).
My ultimate goal was always to increase my ability to produce ships. More ships & better ships. I wanted to make my own ships, weapons, drones, supplies & fuel to keep the war going.... 'cause from my perspective I thought for sure the game designer wanted me to conquer the core worlds haha. In fact, I was so sure of this it's what pushed me to explore the entire galaxy... I thought there must be a "perfect sector" out there somewhere that would make everything easier for my empire.
Even my preferred/favorite ships are different. So many people on this forum talk about the Paragons and I didn't (at the time) understand why. They didn't fit my ship meta at all haha (Too slow and their deployment points are way too high. You burn all your dp with only 2-3 paragons I think (Can't remember exactly, but it seemed like a laughably low amount compared to the huge Wolf/Tempest/Fury fleets I could deploy). I initially settled on the Wolfs. An entire fleet of wolfs that I mostly scavenged and bought (With 1 Superfreighter for cargo and 1 giant fuel ship for range). Wolf's are great in the beginning... Very fast, very low deployment points and they have a low time-to-kill. The issue I had was that due to their combat rating (I think?), their ttk very quickly falls off a cliff as the battle drags on. I later experimented with a Medusa fleet ('cause their ttk doesn't drop off as quickly as the Wolfs), but they didn't have the teleportation ability and their deployment points made the actual combat fleet much smaller. I couldn't make Tempests at the time, and I avoided using ships I couldn't make myself (Buying ships from your enemy is a pretty terrible idea right? I had to be able to make them myself)... So then I experimented with and fell in love with the Fury. Absolutely perfect ship for my play style. I stomped all over the entire galaxy with them, including those 2 angry ships
So yeah, that was my experience/perspective. Like I said I had a blast so hopefully it doesn't sound like a complaint