I did play through the tutorial again.
My Q and E swap was wrong - the ship was upside down at the time. I was supposed to swap W and S instead.
I know about the thrust and agility bars, they're just very off to the side and easy to miss.
Played first level and died to a big thing. A few last issues.
At the end of the tutorial, I ended up with a very low-damage laser that clears armor effectively and has very short range, together with a long-ranged, slow-firing missile with tracer. Killing enemies was painfully slow. Like I needed to pass the weakest enemies around 3 times to kill them. I feel like it shouldn't be possible to screw yourself like that with equipment choices you make in the tutorial.
Couldn't pick up equipment after the first warp. Even if my ship physically goes through them.
a shield and an engine. Then later some more equipment in the same area that I didn't see the first time.
The area was the overlapping area between two beacons. The first two items appeared before I had killed many enemies. Maybe they started spawned, or spawned when I interacted with the beacons. Killing all enemies near the beacons didn't let me pick them up.
Indirect control feels much more agile than direct. That might just be that it switches thrust strength to make large turns, though.
Able to target weapons onto an enemy (the big thing) from very far away (850ish) in overview mode but not in normal mode. Part of that might be because it has really high signature.
When you remove the keyboard control in indirect mode, maybe it should switch to direct mode when you do those keyboard inputs? And vise versa maybe - clicking automatically switches to indirect mode with movement towards that position. That bit might need a setting toggle, though.