Thoughts from a guy with 2,000+ hours in Elite Dangerous ... 800+ in Empyrion ... 400?+ in Starsector ... loads more in the X series games.

Pros:
Surprising amount of depth to the systems.
Solid UI to navigate that complexity.
Felt like a game you could play for hundreds of hours to complete
No crashes ... high polish and attention to detail.
Unique ship building screen and mechanics. (This is where I probably spent most of my time in-game. But I got off-center accidentally which ruined a lot of X-plane/Y-plane shortcuts and I didn't want to rebuild from scratch)
Like in Empyrion ... build decisions affect the performance of the ship. Make you feel a sense of pride about your vessel.
Space flight feels good.
Docking to stations felt good.
Sound felt good.
Collision damage (Empyrion hasn't figured that out)
Missions didn't seem to penalize you if abandoned.
There are some story missions
Hyperjumps felt cool
Mining was OK but could have been sped up a bit.

Cons:
The map is insanely big.
Hyperjump cooldowns started feeling tedious.
The amount of different stations that buy/sell commodities is really overwhelming.
Lots of different factions that felt interchangeable ...
I feel like I failed or abandoned more missions than I completed due to:
- Getting one commodity confused with another
- Going to a station that didn't make or sell the thing I assumed it would.
- The station not having stock
- Finding out that even though I had discovered almost a hundred systems - I hadn't found a station that bought or sold a certain thing.
- All the variation among trading station inventory.
- I had 20 guns on my ship but none of them felt special. I just kept the most valuable ones.

Combat has some snap and fun to it but ... I liked the floating damage numbers. But I never really felt threatened. Or that there was much skill to it.

I also got to the point where I was asking myself "Am I playing this game wrong?" ... cause I don't like fleet management games. I like piloting my ship more than spreadsheets (here's looking at you X4). I think you may need to have fleets of ships doing mining, trades and buys/sells to get where you are going in this game a lot faster ... idk ... I didn't get rich enough to build a station.

Overall ... I'll give it a thumbs up because I love space games ... especially 3D games where you can fly. That was done well here. had fun figuring this one out ... the developers deserve praise for the polish and stable complexity. But I stopped after 50+ hours because the experience started feeling a little wide but shallow ... not the depth of the mechanics ... Avorion has that ... but I kept jumping and jumping but each system seemed like a slight deviation from the previous. That exploration didn't feel rewarding after awhile. They could take some pointers from Starsector here. Where there are a lot of surprises that fuel desire to explore. In Starsector there is a wider range of potency in weapons, and ships .. that progression feels more tangible. There were very little actual threats/urgency other than the steep learning curve and challenge of juggling inventory and missions.

Avorion ultimately wasn't for me ... but it's a deep, meticulously-made, ambitious, voxel game that could give you loads of playtime ...

Out of every space empire game, this one in my opinion is the #1 on the market, I won't use any names ~
But in terms of combat, customisation(On a grand scale), scale of universe, allied support trade system conquering good UI good controls easy access giant space stations modding support it beats the competitors out even with bigger budgets.
It's everything other games tried to do but it did it right for a ship/rts/thirdperson.
It has the Most Weapons, Most ways to Play, best scaling, fun challenging late game you can PvP (and play with friends)
It just has done everything right and you can feel it when you play other games that try to do this, but just don't do it as good.
The only thing it's missing, and it can probably be modded are AI/Response/Voicelines.
Truly a labour of love if I have ever seen one, and in the future I can only imagine what these guys would be capable with more money and more tech.
Even the price tag is fair, compared to the other game that is 140 dollars, I'd say you'd get more out of 40 to these guys than you ever would paying for a more expensive title, looks can be deceiving.
The number of factions and scope of the universe, and the ways they can be modified exceptional content right here.

Oh, I want to love this game, but I can't recommend it as it currently stands, at least on Mac. Its key bindings are too janky and it's not responding to half the clicks and commands I'm inputting. In theory this has so much of what I want (something of a cross between old school Escape Velocity and Rebel Galaxy) but its UI is a disaster.