I really like your idea of making the enemy feel more like a thinking opponent rather than just something you can bait into crashing. Honestly, I thought it’d be tough to consistently pull off those crashes since it takes a couple of seconds for them to actually appear and you still have to dodge everything else — you must be pretty good at the game to pull it off that easily!
Also each of the enemy ship types having its own unique weapon (laser blaster, scatter blaster, homing missiles) was meant to give players a different kind of threat to react to. To help with quickly identifying which ship is coming from behind — especially since they snuck up on me — I added an alert and image at the top of the screen with a coloured border that matches the colour of the weapon they fire. It makes it easier to read the situation fast. But perhaps I could have a hard mode where such information is not displayed.