[Suicide Junkie]

You know, the 2d vs 3d thing doesn't bother me as much as then endless colisions in battle, (crazy ivan tactics)the lack of trade model, or the boring differences in weapons.

One of the first things I did for my mod was to diversify the weapons.

Meson bLasters have become machine gun type weapons doing 3 damage per hit (at level one, double for heavy mount) They fire 3-5x per second, too
Ripper/incinerator beams suck down your power like crazy in order to do lots of damage fast.
Wave motion guns dish out a few hundred damage points, and reload takes a minimum of 30 seconds or 5000 energy.
Torpedoes give some nice punch for breaching shields and getting kill shots, but do less damage over time than beams.

Endless collisions?
Try bumping up the scale in campaign data.txt, and see if that helps.
Once you figure out the navigation rules, you'll also find it much easier to predict what the other ships will do, and collisions will become extremely rare.