My overall experience has been pretty good thus far, except the missions kind of get repetitive after a short while. I know they are working on missions, but I had a few ideas I thought would be kinda cool. I dont know if any of these are feasible but anyway:

1. Maybe have a few missions where you have to kill a well known pirate or something, and maybe you could loot a cool new weapon or battery or something of that nature. I know this could be easily exploitable, but maybe the devs could work something out. :)

2. The HUD is pretty nice the way it is now, but EXP bars would be something to make it substantially better in my opinion. So you could just glance at them as youre killing bots so see how close you are.

More to come.....

item #1 is in the works, at present the missions are largely placeholders while the devs get the rest of the mission content finished enough to add to the game.

item #2 has been a popular request, but actually looses a lot of meaning once the real missions will be implimented, as what missions you have completed and for whom will be more important than yor XP levels.

Good idea on the XP bars, that was one of the first things I was looking for when I started playing.
As far as Spellcast's comment on it though there may be something that I'm not aware of that's coming up. It seems as of now the equipment upgrades and new ships depend on your XP lvl but maybe they'll be moving towards all that stuff being dependant on your "faction" with the corps or races? sry, just kinda grasping at straws. :)