I come from the Megadrive remake of the original, so I have quite a few issues with the interface (quite glitchy, might be DOSBox related, but maybe not?), the extra menus and button presses needed (ironic, for a PC game, but it feels like the goal was to allow playing it with a joystick!). On the other hand, I was even more surprised by some technical feat or ambitious ideas. The universe feels huge and mysterious.
There is something magical about space games of that era that seems to have been somewhat lost since. Maybe simply because the 3D hasn’t been leaving enough space for the imagination, in my case? I just love the routine of getting into a new system, scanning and sorting stuff - but I am very biased toward that kind of stuff.
I found that speeding up the CPU cycles didn’t impede the game’s playability and made it much less annoying navigating the menus.