Willing to accept this for two reasons. First, controlling a ship that you can't modestly accelerate without having to decelerate an equal amount to stop would be annoying. and second, how the hell am I supposed to catch a ship with theoretically near-infinite velocity that shoots past when I'm waiting stationary for a target?
Both points ignore the fact that velocity is relative in space. You don't decelerate unless its relative to something, you can't "stop", and how do you even wait "stationary" in space? Why are you doing nothing if they are going to shoot past you, when you should be trying to match their velocity?
I think your trying too hard to frame this thing as a WWII dogfighting game, when such a game would just be totally unlike that. It would require completely new skills, and a completely different way of thinking.
There is also no need to worry about ships moving near the speed of light. Assuming jet fighters magically worked in space, it would take an impracticaly long time for even our fastest jets to reach these speeds. You would have to worry about enemies constantly accelerating away from you (since you physically coundn't catch up, assuming your craft had the same handling characteristics), but thats trivially solved by just not programming the AI to do that (standard video game design solution. Game AI rarely works optimally in games, even when the optimal solution is trivially computable, because that is often just not
fun). Multiplayer might be a bit more problematic, but that would result in a stalemate, as the other person couldn't score any kills either.
I think it's because flying a frictionless Newtonian spaceship is really confusing.
At first, yes. But that's what makes games fun, learning and mastering new things. And that is what could make a game like this both fresh and fun.
I don't know about you, but personally for me, KSP was the most fun when everything
was really confusing. It gave me with something new to understand and conquer.