I was a lurker on the quartertothree forums back around the time of the SotS2 launch.
I was really impressed with how when the game came out, people started saying "hey wtf", Mecron rushed in "It's okay folks! We'll patch!" Patch comes out, fixes very little, breaks more, players are more "hey wtf". Mecron rushes in: "More patches! More patches!!!" Patches fix nothing meaningful. Mecron: "OH I get it now guys, we released THE WRONG VERSION! We'll put up the RIGHT version and EVERYTHING will be FINE! Okay, try it now!" Players: "hey wtf, ***'s still broke"
Repeat round and round a few more times until finally Mecron had this great emotive breakdown where he attempted to claim that the stress of releasing all these patches had retroactively borked their systems and broken the functional version of the game and now everybody would just have to wait a month for a real patch. Players: "dude, version control doesn't work that way, you were just lying this whole time, weren't you? the game wasn't done, we get it, just stop lying to us"
But Mecron was not capable of stopping himself from lying. Just could not admit it.
And for a truly proper ending to the saga, the publisher refunded anybody who wanted one but said "look, we paid that studio for a functional game, they've been paid, if you want a functional game you need to talk to them". And Mecron: "Oh, we'll GLADLY work some more on this but we don't work for free you know! The publisher needs to pay us more before we do anything!"
Complete and total lack of responsibility or honesty or fair dealing of any sort.
It is fitting and proper that they have been relegated to dinky little mobile games ever since. From what I understand there is not a single publisher anywhere that will trust them. Understandably.
But as far as the mod goes:
When I looked at this a few weeks back, the Hive planets were spamming the market with requests for certain commodities, making it impossible to tell which of the core worlds actually needed those commodities. (Unless you install Stellar Networks, which is a good mod but has a huge overhead so I don't use it) Also I kept getting mission givers who wanted me to take stuff to Hiver planets. Dude, no; they want to eat my liver. If Hivers could be made into something more like the Remnant - completely disconnected from the human-world economy and society - that would solve my major problem with this mod.
Also I actually kinda think the ships shouldn't be so explicitly bug-like. When humans make spaceships, do they look like flying monkeys? No? Why not? Why would bug spacers make flying bug spacecraft? Bug design, yes; flying space bugs, maybe not so much.
I like the idea though. (SotS1 wasn't a terrible game, except for the space dolphins - always kill the space dolphins) The other thing that might work as a source of ideas is the Symbiots from Emperor of the Fading Suns (it's on GOG, but you might be able to find it some abandonware sites as well). I think it's Matt Caspermeyer who figured out how to hack the executable to make the Symbiots build spaceships, which means they immediately start assaulting the Stigmata garrison, which means the players need to actively cooperate to try to hold them back from invading the rest of the map. Made for a genuinely interesting alien threat.