Weirdly not much feedback lately.
As for myself. I don’t feel kind of the push of the past, also quite busy with work and such.
Also maybe, the game is in a quite alright state. 
Nah honestly, good work till now. I expect this week to be a “break week” as I didn’t see any patchnotes, apparently they were only posted on steam: https://steamcommunity.com/games/1079620/announcements/detail/1646555578395706292
The meta in PVP seems to be quite established by now. With the lower player numbers its importance wained a bit but it is still visible strongly in PVP.
Missiles seem to be in a good spot now, in my oppinion.
Torpedoes feel a bit strong. Or quite so. In most of my PVP engagements in capital ships torpedoes did at least 50% damage inplicted on me. They have the range advantage and are really hard to dogde with the cruiser. It is alright if I had some escorts. Still, it also happened in the middle of an NPC fight. I’ll wait out and see how this changes with the lazor defenses.
Main suggestion why I made this thread is a little one. The new chat window is awesome and super powerful. Moreso then probably even needed. I think it will be more then enough till release, well done. What I would like to see though, to preserve screen space and make it look nicer, is if the message history could align to the bottom of the chat window, close to where the input is instead of alligning to the top like currently.
This would make it look better if less messages are there, as they wouldn’t float some halfway up on the side of the screen. It would also make apearing messages create more movement, as those would move “the stack” instead of disapearing messages, like now. This would help with peripheral awareness.
Some fade and animation on sliding messages and on the disapearing message would be also nice, but that’s polish that I hope there will be time for at the end.
Take time to polish the game before release once you got the important parts in. Another few more missions or guns aren’t of much use if the first impression doesn’t retain. Some super fun mission types and progression hooks help, sure, I count those as basics though as they are missing and kind of what holds the game back.
So the player numbers a bit above pre Early Access release now. I don’t want to tout the stuff on the steam forums, that’s quite a pesimistic view on stuff. They have a point … but I mean we have mentioned this problem for years now, so I don’t have anything more to add now then I had back when Battlescape even was revealed and after it was Kickstarted.
I wouldn’t be mad at all if there was a limited free to play version of the game. But only if you don’t blow your chance. It’s only worth the trade if the player retention will be there and if the game is polished enough and actually working for players to get the full game or pay for features and stuff individually.
VR would also bring in a wave of people but this, as well, is only worth it if … yes … it is milked.
For players, for long term players, for a healthy community and of course for money that could be turned into cool other games.
Keep going. And please ask for specific feedback now that the general feedback has dropped off somewhat.
As for the last update, nice additions. Makes it yet more apparent that either everything needs more tooltips or a kind of tutorial or, what other games do, “Wizzard” kind of setup … or of course a plethora of input options.
I super hope that the unification coming up soon (I am super excited by the way … yes, about such a thing) and some small changes afterwards will leave the input system solid so we can build a suite of input profiles that cover most people and work.
The automatic device detection is a wonderful idea! Great work there. I think this is indeed the best solution. Leave the manual configuration to the people who are willing to put in time. They can go on forums and discord if something is not clear to them.