I've read the OP and it seems like quite a nice game going on! Mosts of the concepts seem very nice, however maybe not always because of the reason you conceived them - for example, I love edicts not because of immersion stuff (like not being able to magically control everything in the empire), but because what kills 4X games for me is amount of micromanagement after a while. It always seems so counterintuitive that an emperor ruling 25 systems have to manually load the population on transport ships, set the waypoints to avoid enemy-controlled system, and unload the population in another system. My people should do that for me! "Let the slaves be relocated to HellHole V, I say!" and somebody takes care of loading and unloading, and the pilot of transport ship doesn't fly head-on into system full of mines and enemy ships and stuff.
Than again, I would love to be able to designate some 'pet projects' of the Emperor, to be hand-crafted in minute detail. Those could be like ongoing edicts, tying up some ADM points, but allowing you to use FTL communication devices to, for example, govern a planet of your choosing much more in-depth. Wouldn't it be great for tyrannical emperor to take personal interest in his most terrible, diabolical prison planet?
That, and I'm still waiting for a 4X game that let you hand-pick a crew for your super-heavy battleship (let it be space battleship or old-school float-on-water battleship). I can imagine tying up an ADM point to personally keep an eye on every crew member of Tyrannical Destructor, proud of the Demonic Navy of Human Empire. It would be just so great.