the D3 definitely has potential. There were moments of play where I fleeted up with a romulan warbird in my litle frigate. As the warbird went around defending our main planets, we did encounter an honorable fleet of sovereign flying feds. It was my little frigate, his warbird, and a raptor as fleet versus fed galaxy and two sovs. good fights.
Anyway, the lack of mission scripts is the real killer in my opinion. Even though the tactics and complications aren't nearly on par with SFC2, if the D3 had more missions, including those suprise attack encounters or what not, especially against borg cubes, whatever, it would be nice. It would have been nice if a lot of small things are added. D3 will probably take much longer to mature than D2 because no one really has experience with the system. SFC2 is basically SFB, despite what some people theorize. Sure, it is 'different', but people could kind of use their intuition and figure out how to make good servers. D3 has completely different tactics, not as much variation, not as much history or story to throw in, and there is rampant customization that is difficult to control. I'm starting to realize just how much of a benefit stock ships are. I like customization, but perhaps we are given too much control in SFC3.
I did have a whacky idea enter my head though. What if someone were to, and I wonder if this were possible, mod the game so that it played... well like SFC2. That would probably be a major thing though, not something you just 'mod' in. Heck, you could even then theoretically just throw in all the 200,390,309, some odd olds starships and play with that. And to maintain the tng flavor, just create a bunch of variants of the stock ships they have, etc., you know what i'm getting at. But tha'ts a really big pipe dream, nothing i could do myself, and something that may be seemingly overly complicated. The fleeting feature in D3 is definitely really nice though.