Damn, all this talk about mechanics sounds awesome, makes me wanna play the game, but then I remember how boring I actually found space combat back when I tried it 
Somewhat like CoH, I find that knowing a bit of the metagame makes the act of playing the gamegame more interesting. For example,
this can make ground combat all kinds of interesting.
In general, I find space combat to be a fun thing to do for a while, but a little boring to grind too much of. I spend as much time metagaming STO as I do gaming it. Which is to say, I play, but I also spend similar time thinking about what I want to do next to add that little bit of improvement to my main alts. There's still a lot of stuff I'm learning, and while I'm on the learning curve it is still interesting to see what this does or that does. There's nothing in STO like, say, the Magisterium trial that I liked running just to run it, as many times as it was being run. But there's also enough diversity in content for now that I can scratch my STO itch by running a couple of fast Crystalline queues, a couple of mission arcs, a couple of specific missions to farm the bonus gear rewards, and set up duty officer offline stuff. Sometimes, like this past week, I log an alt in, run the Risa event thing once, and then log out, and that's enough for me until I feel the urge to play more.
STO is not as interesting to me as CoH was, but it is interesting enough to keep my attention occasionally, and sometimes more than that. But its gameplay basics in general are not quite as interesting as CoH's were to me as a personal preference. There is, however, more for me to learn in STO than there was in CoH, where I basically saw everything, knew everything, did everything, went everywhere, knew everyone, and accomplished pretty much everything.
