Take in mind I am not a new guy attempting to master this game over night when reading this posting.
From what I can recall with the straight CD version of this game. You had more mod ability of each ship type in the game. The shields could endure a hell of a pounding. While spending 30 minutes in an out matched fight of a Norway vs Warbird would offer a high reward.
Granted I have only been playing the new patch for the past two days but I have noticed some things I can live with ..and others that just don't seem to make sense.
The Out Matched One Vs One against a Rom Warbird while in my Norway. After some 30 minutes of fighting and a loss of 50% of my ships structure the big green death machine was space debri. At the end of the fight I was expecting to see a reward of close to 250pts. But instead I see a lovely 75 with I thought a -25 bonus on top of it. So the point of out classed matches are completely not worth the investment of your time. By the time you repair your hull your indebt atleast 2 times more than you received in the match.
As for the shields, I remember being able to atleast upgrade 2 shield facings on about every ship. And it seemed to me that the shield recharge rate was extremely high compaired to its current rating. Now don't get me wrong I don't mind not being able to up-grade those shields as long as the shield recharge rate was fairly robust. Even with max power (red line) on shields it takes over two minutes to bring up shields back up to normal strength. Even if this time was reduced to closer to a minute I know it would be extremely helpful. The issue I think everyone is running into, is those close range Alpha strikes. Which will usually drop someone shields in a heart beat and cause some internal damage. But the AI and worse yet an human player can repeat this step on fresh shields and reak a ton of havok even though you may be pushing the red-line on shield recharging and doing evasives to dodge the incoming fire.
As for the officers, I have yet to have a problem with any of them getting wounded or killed off. For the most part I have yet to allow another ship to get in a close Alpha strike on my ship on a head on attack. This might be the reason behind those crew injuries for the most part. I know my engineer has been hit once...happend against the Warbird in the Norway.
As for the latest stock patch ... I have yet to see a D3 that uses it stock, that alone speaks volumes of what the players want.