Yeah, I really hope they clean some of this stuff up - one thing I hate is not having any direct control over the ships. Having played HW for so long I spent all of my first and second try at the demo mission wanting to issue movement orders and cursing at the stupidity of the ships. I imagine of course that I'm doing something wrong but it's still annoying not to have direct control over movement when you have control over everything else.
It'd also be nice to see a tutorial mission, I'm a little worried that dropping everyone in the deep end without any knowlege of the game when they're out-numbered and out-gunned is going to put a lot of people off since they won't beat or even make a difference to the outcoming of the demo the first few times they play.
It seems to have gotten rid of a lot of planetry micromanagement (apparently) although there may be some added into the final release. But then again we've no direct control over ships so it's not like HW either... which means that in the end it's just a case of learning what to click and when to beat the game and that doesn't look like fun to me - even if it does look incredible.