Recent reviews by Daemonmatrix

The start is rough, you can get to the biggest ship outside a fleet carrier within days using some youtube starter videos and as of the time of this review mission stacking (getting the same pirate kill mission from multiple system factions n addition to grabbing both a hard and easy kill mission from at least one of those to spawn the easy threat signal).

The nuance is being able to engineer (mod) you're individual components to make them better than the shop versions and buying the specialty modules from each of the 11 major factions particularly the Prismatic shields of which you need to buy I think 7 or 8 to have one for each type of ship going forward.

The main benefit is being able to choose solo play to avoid getting ganked by players while transporting valuable cargo/mining and starting/stopping play whenever you want outside of being mid combat which makes it good for casual play.