The difficulty in the game is fine, one of the main problems is the Ship progression is not inches but massive leaps.
I mean the difference between a Sidewinder > Eagle > Adder > Viper Mk II > Cobra Mk III is reasonable, but then past that the majority of ships in the Mid-Range are Transporters (not designed for Combat) with the ASP being the ONLY real choice but sporting a fairly hefty price tag.
This doesn't bother me as such in that the ASP is 6.6mil, while the Cobra Mk III is only 390k meaning that you have a massive slog just to get to the point where you're starting to be relatively combat capable; especially when you have the choice of either investing more heavily in upgrading the Cobra to be viable or going the pure trade route for the highest return (well outside of high-piracy systems) ... this isn't exactly helped by the fact that Upgrades are eclectically provided at best.
Sure this was great in Frontier where you were the only player, so generally you stuck to the High-Value Trade / Mission areas until you got the Ship you wanted; but with the market being a bit more twitchy here due to external influence, well really the options available need to be focused around the types of ship that Economy suits against the Tech Level (something curiously absent)
This is made even worse by frankly a terrible Outfitting Menu, as well as some "Upgrades" actually far from being an actual upgrade; at least when you check against the 'Quick Info', and there isn't exactly an extensive description or 'Show Full Info' option.
Honestly the Outfitter should be a Tiered Menu, where you select the Type (in open slots) >> Class >> Grade, just to clean it up and see what IS actually available rather than endless scrolling.
There should be an option to get 'Trade' and 'Outfit' Data, so you can see and/or order parts (that could have a cool/down delivery timer) for fitting the ship better.
I'd also say the Automatic Turrets, honestly are OP as balls right now; especially on the larger ships. These were 'Manually' aimed in Frontier and First Encounters, as the larger ships were about as manoeuvrable as an iceberg; although for some reason the Python is capable of easily out-manoeuvring most ships... again that's a serious balance issue, favouring money thrown at a problem.
Something else is in the previous games, we were able to fit 'Above' what was intended for a given ship; it took up more Power and Cargo Space, sure but I don't see why we can't do the same here.
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None of this is specifically a complaint about the difficulty (although seriously most NPCs actually seem to be designed to fight those who have Flight Sticks so get a complete range of analogue movement over Controller or Mouse & Keyboard; where-as the 'Elite Rating' should really feed into how well your opponent can "fly" their ship; not saying make it easy, just in High-Security systems it makes more sense to have lower rating pilots that can be used to better learn the flight controls instead of currently where Dangerous+ NPCs show up everywhere and frankly are capable of flying amazingly well ... again usually with turreted weapons, which if the Devs had notice by replaying the Combat Tutorials there is no longer any 'Blind Spot' on most of the high-end ships because of those weapons)
This is more a complaint that the progression curve available is almost non existent because of the very small selection of ships and is deliberately obfuscated with needlessly basic menus that could easily have some better User Interface design ideology used.
