When I first found this game (through word of mouth) my favorite not-so-little-person was, 9. He's, uh... 17 now, lol. When I bought the game, it had, er... some "missions" and, uh... a very empty, barren Corvus System, with a few fleets of Pirates and the Hegemony Defense Fleet.
It was one of those games where I wanted to mod it immediately (this happens a lot), and he was very excited about being able to make spaceships, so I taught him how to draw mirrored images with a straight-edge line on paper, scan them and get them colored and all that, in my office. He really enjoyed the idea of making spaceships and made dozens of drawings, most of which are now lost to time. I'd never done anything serious with 2D spaceship art (or 2D art in general) since I made a couple of spacecraft on an ancient Macintosh for Escape Velocity... so trying to figure out what David was doing, exactly, was entertaining.
I eventually got around to semi-formally learning Java, because he kept coming up with game ideas and people were doing all sorts of crazy things, like making fleets move around each other, or altering fundamental game-rules. That's when it went from being a minor thing to a major time-sink, from time to time. I've definitely pushed the 1000-hour mark trying out crazy ideas. Meanwhile, the rest of my life has happened, and I've been super-busy, so I kind of flit in here when I can, see if anybody's said anything interesting, then dip back out for days, weeks, sometimes months.
I've sold the game to a lot of my friends over the years, bought it for kids and so forth. Most of them are awaiting 1.0 before trying it out again, after getting into long, nerdy discussions about how to properly structure difficulty ramps, the role of RNG in game design, theories of combat balance in a game like this (at one point I had a four-way mini-panel involving a little too much beer, and Starships Forever as a test-bed), the history of pixel-art... and so forth.
We're all hoping that the final result, "doesn't suck" but I certainly have gotten my ten bucks-worth, lol.