Yeah, I think the comment about comparing SF to SEI or II is a good one. SEIV Gold is so good because it's got many many years of player suggestions incorporated into it. Malfador has really responded to suggestions for years, and that's what made SEIV Gold so satisfying. So I expect that if SF gets plenty of enthusiastic fans making suggestions, it'll become more and more appealing to more and more players. I think it will take more than just modding the original release to completely address some things I mentioned, but I'm sure we'll see many nice improvements in patches, as well as some great mods and new adventures.
For those looking for 3D, a while back I played "X - Beyond the Frontier" from Egosoft that was a pretty good update of Elite. More trading, far less ship customization than Starfury. I just checked the website and it looks like they have a demo of something new.