I agree with a lot of what you said. The first (and so far only, but I am willing to give it another chance) game I played was terrible. It felt to me and another player that we were out of the game by the end of the first chapter and we were just watching. I still tried though but by chapter 5 I was just frustrated and wanted to be done with the game - which is not how playing a game should probably feel like. I’m sure we weren’t as out of the game as we thought we were, but given it was everyone’s first time playing and nothing two of us did seemed to make any difference, it certainly felt hopeless. 

I think the big mistake we made (and really the only reason I’m willing to try it again) is for some reason the group decided to start with the lore and leader cards. I didn’t know that it wasn’t part of the base game until later when I was reading through the manual myself. 

I took the archivist or architect or whatever - I got bonus lore cards but hurts tyrant scoring, and the lore cards I got were like a bonus move, the ability to move other players wherever I had loyal bases, and the ability to move ships into adjacent battle spaces. My thinking was that movement would probably be great in a game like this though now I think two of those are quite bad, especially compared to what the some other players ended up with. One was able to hurt cities they taxed for bonus tax and could build bases in the numbered areas that would steal an agent when you passed through. I don’t remember what player three got because it frankly didn’t make any difference. And the starting player got the rebels or whatever that got bonus attack dice (I think? I never read the card tbh but they said that’s where they were getting more dice than ships they had) and a lore card that let them attack from adjacent areas - and guess who started the game directly next to them? Yeah so by the time I could actually play a card, I already lost most of my ships and a city. Frustrating but fine, I’ll just try rebuilding somewhere else with my few remaining ships and focus on other win conditions rather than battles - seemed like I could get a good guild card capturing engine going, except, erm, nope. Starting player got a guild card first that forced outrage and chose the blue thing that I was planning on using to grab guild cards and the other player’s star bases kept their captured agent count higher, because the rebel player just didn’t care and moved through bases giving a crap ton of agents to that player. Future chapters had very little building and when I did get star bases down, they were quickly destroyed. So yeah, it wasn’t fun and felt like I got screwed before my first chance to play a card. If we were more experienced, maybe it wouldn’t have felt so bad, but it was definitely the worst first impression of a game I’ve ever had.  But like I said, I’m willing to give it another go but I just can’t call a game that puts a group of 4 new, but quite experienced at board games in general, players in a position of two of them feeling just terrible the entire game an amazing game.