I enjoy this game overall, but I feel that the tech tree could use a bit of tweaking. The interface to navigate the techs is clumsy, and there seem to be an awful lot of techs that have no real gameplay benefit other than to facilitate other techs, or offer some interesting new 3D widget to my shipyard. It's very frustrating to spend weeks researching a tech that sounds like it offers something valuable, only to find it provides no meaningful gameplay benefit at all. (Granted, real-life R&D is a lot like that, but this is a game, so it should be a bit more fun than real life)
I think a ruthless pruning of the tech tree might help both navigation (by making the chart smaller) and gameplay.