Upon reading this my body is squirting fluids I didn't even know it had!

A month is too long!

I am starting to suspect that i might have a idea what the combat will be like. In another place you described it like MTG. You have also repeatedly said that you wouldn't have direct control over orders. link that with that you have said here as well as how combat worked in GC2 and I am thinking I can guess something close to the ballpark.

I am betting it will be like this. Where when battle starts you have to lay your ships down on a grid across from your opponents ships.

            Y <----------- Routing ship

      O O O O O

      O O O O O    O <-----Flanking ship

 Y   Y  Y  Y Y  Y <--- front lines

      Y  Y  Y Y  Y <---- back row

Each ship will trade fire with the ship directly in front of them unless they have an ability that modifies that. Such as long range missiles that allow a ship in the back row to shoot into the front line, or a heavy sweeping laser that fires on every ship in the front row so long as the ship it's on is also in the front row. The position ships can take would be decided by ship upgrades or by logistic upgrades. Upgrades like high speed engines or cloaking fields allow you to palace a ship in more places. A ship with high grade thrusters can be placed on the flanks and directly attack the back row, unless they are matched by another ship with flank. A cloaked ship would be able to placed in the rear position allowing it to directly attack the back row regardless of any enemy flankers.

In this system, you could allow for a lot of depth in how you build and design your fleets. Maybe you want to be really efficient so you build defensive blocker ships to hold the font line well the real damage comes from the glass cannon ships in the back. It would be the most efficient setup, but it would be weak to flanking and cloaked ships that can bypass your front line. If your facing a very sneaky battle, you might elect to go with a more uniform fleet limiting the effectiveness of flanking by giving flanking ships no where weak to strike. You could also build other more exotic fleets like a fleet consisting of one really big sweeping laser to defend a fleet composed of dozens of small ships.

Of coarse this is all totally just guessing.

I'd try and deal with this by having "timed" tooltips.
Essentially, it functions as a multi-level tooltip.
Hovering your mouse over something will give the level 1 tooltip, immediate information.
Holding the mouse over it for a period longer will then bring up level 2 information (either attaching it to the previous information or cycling though it), which is generally the stuff you have stated you don't need to see like other "relevant" info.
If there was a need, you could have a Level 3 tooltip that adds stuff like "fluff" ect.

Players can manually adjust the timer (or turn certain levels off entirely) to tailor the tooltips to the level of information they require.
Example: setting level 1 to 0 seconds, level 2 to off, and level 3 to 5 seconds would mean when you hover your mouse over something, you will immediately get that important information, leaving the mouse there for 5 seconds would then bring up a little box of fluff, annexed underneath and the level 2 "related" information wont appear at all.

Then you can have the level of information you want, at the speed and frequency you want it  

Can't wait to see how this is.

People are already intrepreting this. Is it like Endless space. Can't wait to see what you've done hear. Going to have to change my stance on warfare in the next game a little.

If it is not too much information what?

I guess I'm really guilty of this. I can see that I was a little wrong on how they will do battle. At least some of my questions get answered this way. I don't know why, but some of this just drives me nuts all day until I put it on the posts then I move on to something else.

I have to say that I do the reverse while I use the Planet/ship tab; because it is better to my opinion on changing the build Ques for my whole empire.

Good idea it never ocured to me to think of this!!!

There were a couple sorting options on the planet panel completely absent from the colonies tab. The most important of which was the ability to sort through uninhabited and enemy planets. I use both extensively and probably spend more time on the colonies tab than the planet list, but if I had to do without one I'd lose the colony tab with no hesitation at all. Anything you can do on the colony tab can be done from the planet list, but the reverse is not even close to true.

Sorting by planet quality to prioritize colonization. Sorting by habitability to prioritize colonization by sector (i.e. claim the Aquatic worlds in the Torian area, but leave the Toxic ones if they don't have that tech yet). Searching enemy planets by population - the AI determines the value of its own planets solely by population, so freshly colonized planets can be bought dirt cheap.

Searching for resource starbases; I send a fleet of constructors that way and pay people to attack anyone who has a resource I want. I get the resource without being in a war myself.

No, that's a totally separate exploit. And it does require at least some espionage spending.

Something I do very rarely from that screen. I tend to fine tune production, which involves more than just refocusing.

But it lacks the single most important type of information: location and context. Knowing Mars is building a transport is nice, but without being able to see the area around it that datum is pretty irrelevant. Since my preferred maps tend to have 400+ habitable planets, I can't memorize the surroundings of each one.

See above. Not being able to see the map is a BIG handicap. But for things I don't need to see the map while doing, I do use the colony tab because the layout is better. It's just that the better layout isn't always worth the cost of not being able to see my map.

If there is no morale anymore, then what is keeping your population in check (besides the amount of farms, I mean)?

Hmm, admittedly I did not know that. Its a pretty cheap trick to pull on the AI, I ought to try it ( You need every cheap tricks you can when you play at Masochistic + ) 

Honestly this debate is starting to feel like SNES vs Sega Genesis so im out. Maybe I underestimated the Ship/Planet Tab, but I still feel more comfortable using the colonies tabs.

It seems we play different type of maps. I kinda like large maps but with small-medium clusters and limited habitable planets. It makes the map feel more "space like" than a densely star peppered map.  Ship speed, sensor range and range also matter a lot more.

One of the shots in the vault shows an empire-wide approval stat, but the planet shots do not. It appears that approval won't vary planet to planet, which is indeed a major bummer.

I'm apparently one of the minority that doesn't care much about the single queue change. I rarely had planets building both at the same time, so I guess it just doesn't bother me that much.

Glad to hear the approval system is not gone. I guess they do that because of the Ai. Because I never heard even one complaint about approval. The planet per planet, and the empire wide approval was fine. This at least gave me a reason to build influence improvements. If anything bring back revolutions.

I thought I heard them talking about replacing per planet approval with empire approval to make it more flexible and interesting. So you could have things like pleasure planets.