Don't want to steal the reply to Sleutelbos, but if I may give my two cents (ehm, credits I mean),
absolutely get the HoL dlc if you can (and of course if you like the rest of the game already there, no point in adding a side dish if the main meal tastes bad to you
).
It doesn't add much in the way of new ships or items (there are several bits of gameplay and added items, like SETA and jumpdrive for the Skunk, and also the ability to loot and craft weapons modifications, that are shipped for free with the 4.0 patch even without the dlc), but the new sectors are worth it for me, and the Home of Light system itself is very well set up and thought out. It's large enough to sustain a lot of "economic" gameplay on its own, has lots of stations, places, and is on the whole a one huge ring of commercial districts built
along a single highway (a widely more logical way of using highways, compared to the questionable "spaghetti in space" of the original systems).
Toride is very atmospheric, huge and completely devoid of highways (but there's a network of space anomalies detectable on scanners that allow instant travel from one to another, don't remember if in a random or fixed pattern), full with angry aliens and also with huge asteroid fields that capital ships completely fail to navigate [sour] (better not to be in the same system when they try to, so they'll zip straight through them).
And then there's Cold Star, another huge system full with mining opportunities, with some zones connected by highways, but many more not. On the whole, the actual game area is almost doubled compared to the original game (and if you put the Teladi dlc in the mix too it's more than double).
I didn't play many hours with the dlc content in the end, but most of them, I simply stayed still in random points of the Home of Light commercial districts, soaking up the scenery, the hundreds of little ships going around, the freighters doing their business, the stunning music of the new system (Alexei Zhakarov is a guarantee of quality).
