[Heartless]

Reintroducing clusters was (and still is) a good overall idea. Even if clusters develop into different directions (the ones Sjor pointed out), they are still good for people to go to and try to create more ties between people. They might need some more pondering though, f.e. people in inactive galaxies were still pretty much screwed if they never managed to get to know about a possible cluster alliance.

Eitrades - was an addition that made me go "wtf?". The game has other problems which have to be sorted first before you can consider adding more races, f.e. the combat engine, and therefore the ship stats, can hardly manage 4 races (as it was already pointed out correctly) - as such the introduction of a 5th race to me is more like a sign to want to do something but without really considering the overall impact of it. Imho the only reason it was implemented was probably to have the marketing-ability to say "something great" was introduced.

Free/Paid accounts can be kept as they are, imho. Admittedly, I haven't played a free account this round, but from the paper it looks like an alternative to go (even though you lack engineering).