It's not that the game doesn't hold your hand, it's that, oftentimes, it doesn't explain its conceits. You can get away with not holding hands and being complex, but you can't get away with being opaque, and right now, the game is opaque.

And manuals are stupid as hell. There's a reason we had manuals back in the day, because we didn't have a lot of space, and we had to reuse textures for clouds and bushes, because we only had four free bytes on the game disk. That isn't the case anymore. Slogging through 100 pages of manual is unacceptable and plain bad game design. Look at board games. If you're learning to play a board game, the best way, by far, is to just play the game with someone who already knows how to play.

Yes, there's basic training missions that are woefully inadequate. The first thing 90% of players are going to do once they get a feel for the game is try to find a fight. They'll look at the bulletin board and try and find a combat mission. They find one with a low payout and go at it and then... nothing? "Go to X System and Kill Pirates/Traders" Who's a trader, who's a pirate? How do I find them? The manual mentions nothing of SS's, is this T9 I dropped out right next to that's trying to buy High Tech Parts a trader, or something else? Are these people with "Wanted" under their names pirates one and all?

It's opaque. The game should arm you with the knowledge of the basics. You should have the working knowledge of someone who has saved up enough money to buy a sidewinder and strike out working on their own, not an amnesiac time traveller who woke up at the controls of a spaceship.

This game has a real problem with fanboyism.