I agree with you on the map. Where I took on the no art and system agnostic challenges, it did hamstring more than I thought it would. The tables used are very much a stopgap that worked just enough. Not worked well, just enough.
How I work is that when I write for a particular system, I know the characters, so I can stat them. Here I tried to approximate best matches of skills, equipment and abilities. I think that worked well enough. At the cost of me having clear character concepts for the people around the player group.
Where I disagree is the idea of breaking the tension. I've run something similar to this a while back as an intro to ttrpg adventure session. One that was more horror focused. The horror I'm leaning on here is very much not showing the monster at all. I'm leaving the space for uncomfortable implications and incomplete answers.
Where I'm wondering if you missed some context, implications is that the drone intelligence is meant to target ships. It doesn't hunt people, it hunts ships. It has limits in its abilities. Freaking people out, psychological warfare? Get under the skin of a crew to make them abandon ship fits with its purpose. Outright murder and Saw type of traps? Not so much.
Another factor I'm wondering about your perspective on, is that some of this isn't meant to give any answers. Going into this expecting answers and finding none? That's meant to be part of the problem, the mystery and the subversion of expectation. The sabotage being so incomplete but the evacuation so thorough?
I chose to make the tension so slow burn I didn't need a release in the middle of the story. When it's at the peak, the entity's escape and reset, refresh.
If there's another weakness it has is that it is very much written for me to run. The Running Guide I put was an attempt to answer some of your questions.