I really liked The Hive, just because as the game progressed, and more and more AI empires wanted to launch fleets at me from god knows where, I could do the gate dance and block each fleet with minimal attrition for the most part. Then yeah, here comes a Zuul fleet, and *pop* goes my defensive armada.
I felt like I was getting pretty handy at controlling my ships, such as the controls were. But they would still bind up, and IIRC I had huge problems with ships that had weapons of multiple ranges not wanting to close to use all weapons, and if they did, they would try to stack on top of eachother and get stuck while the enemy sailed back to take out my gate ships, and my command ships.
I don't know, as bad as all that was, it was most definitely the Zuul bastards with their imba weapons that drove me away. I have a very high BS threshold, and generally consider it a challenge to make faulty controls, bad pathing, and awkward AI do what I want them to do.
But when someone can throw a fleet full of garbage at me, and do horrible damage just because one ship can fire the dreaded God Fart Torpedo, it's a sour sour day. You're actually making me want to install and play it again, and disable the Zuul from AI selection. <3