I played a bit, but didn't find the game difficult at all, on the moderate difficulty. I found an early route where I could jump back and forth buying and selling books and plants at a good profit, managing to upgrade my ship a few times in the process. A bit of traveling with minimal profits along the way found another good route smuggling narcotics in an area with very little police presence and the systems were very close together. I bribed the few police that I encountered (which was only like 1 every 5 or so round trips) and managed a few more upgrades. I eventually got a reuseable cloaking device and max training in technician, which allowed me to go pretty much anywhere I wanted and smuggle whatever. I soon got the biggest ship and made huge amounts of money and started playing with the different equipment, killing pirate ships and such. The actual hunting of pirates isn't very profitable at all though, I make hundreds of thousands on simple trade runs while the pirates give a few thousand. The cloaking device soon became useless, as even with maxed technician and an engineer's toolbox everything detects me.
I got the discontinuity thing a few times, but never lost due to it because I was keeping hyperspace devices with me and when it happened I just used one to jump to a system. They're also great for escaping if you're about to die to pirates. The advanced ones let you go anywhere you want, while the basic ones are super cheap and are just good for a life preserver should disaster strike.
At this point I kinda got bored of it though. I used advanced hyperspace devices to jump around to all the training places and got all my skills maxed, killed some space monsters, hunted down a bunch of pirates. I have licenses to haul all the illegal cargo and advanced hyperspace devices to go anywhere for maximum profit (with the ability to make like 1 mil per round trip if I look for the best spots). I'm not sure what all else there is to do. I'm on day 863 with the biggest ship, a variety of toys (weapons, shields, engines, etc), 10 mil, and 14 in all skills. I could get massive amounts of money in a very short order by hyperspace jumping between places with radically different prices of the expensive goods like luxuries, but don't really see a point in it.
One thing that I think would make the game better is to separate the equipment space and the cargo space, either that or make some of the equipment a lot smaller. Having weapons and shields on the ship makes trading routes that would otherwise be extremely profitable practically useless because you lose too much cargo space, so the only way to make a good profit trading once you're advanced a bit is to strip the ship down and warp back and forth with nothing onboard but advanced hyperspace devices and enough fuel to move far enough to encounter a ship (you can't use the hyperspace device unless you encounter something).