Anyone else playing this much? I've been contributing to their forums under the name Dahak

It's certainly a bit unpolished, but definitely worth the $25. Even unfinished, the game has more design depth with ships than any I've ever played before. Tiny changes in a ship can Double, triple, etc its effectiveness. The AI is a bit weak ATM, but improving. The devs work extremely fast, and talk with the playerbase plenty. They also listen to suggestions, and several recent suggestions have been picked up for implementation in the very next weeks patch.
I've been doing A LOT of experimentation and the such recently, both for bug reporting, as well as perfecting some of my concepts. Even if you know some of the grammatically strange things (Damage reduction on armor is actually absorption, hull DR is a percent that is absorbed, and so on), there's still an incredible amount to learn in ship design and the such.