I think that the thing about the difficulty curve has a point.
For the newbies, we need to bear in mind: they don't understand the combat mechanics, they haven't bothered playing the Missions, they don't have skills yet. Most of them haven't even bothered with the tutorial.
I have a couple of ideas about this issue.
1. Make a Mission that players need to get through at the start of play on a new playthrough that takes them through the Tutorial. I think that a heck of a lot of players aren't bothering and are getting real, real frustrated when they're trying to climb the cliff all at once. All of us who've been here a while just had to pick up the CR system and figure out what was UP / OP this time; for newbies, it was probably pretty crushing to buy this thing and find that there really is no easy intro and that death is just a few screwups in terms of buy-order away.
The idea that players will find out quickly that they need to become Buffalo-hunters for quite some time and save up money isn't realistic; first-time players really do need to do a bit of learning about the economics behind the CR system, or it needs to be heavily nerfed until the other elements are available.
2. I think that the death-spiral issue's a big problem, largely because the game's not giving players enough information about what's up or is presenting it in a way that's not quite easy enough to read. For example, if the player's out of Supplies, the first time that happens, the game should go ahead and throw up a Dialog, saying something along the lines of, "Your supplies are exhausted, and time is running out. Either Mothball your fleet and head to the nearest Station to buy Supplies at exorbitant rates or pick a fight with another fleet as soon as possible to gain their Supplies and save your fleet!"
3. Lastly, one of the issues here that's been pointed out more than once is that, inadvertently or not, Supplies have become the de-facto currency in the game.
That's fine and dandy- survivalist gameplay is not a bad idea in and of itself - but if it's going to keep working like that, beyond the range of nerfs for 0.61a to simply make Fighters viable-ish, it needs to be much more emphasized as the game moves forwards, so that newbies understand, as quickly as possible, the core things all of us vets know:
A. Big fleets <> powerful fleets. Small fleets can defeat very large ones... if you're skilled.
B. It is very unwise to build a fleet's size until you are quite sure you can keep it supplied.
C. It is important at all times to keep supply use down in large fleets by using Mothball whenever possible.
D. You gain some experience for anything you kill, but you also gain experience after taking losses.
E. Losing your fleet is not the end of your story.