Thanks for playing and the detailed feedback, very helpful to hear about the unclear or annoying moments!
A few of your points will hopefully be solved with the latest update, especially those that result from poor performance. Settlement boosts are gone now, they were a bit strange indeed.
System mode will very likely get some changes as well in the future on how settlement, relays and hubs interact. Not quite easy to find a way that feels logical, is fun but also not overly complicated and scales well. Have been discussing it with people in the discord already, too.
11 and 12 should be part of the next update. The cargo drone problems are very likely a problem of limited H2 (or the limited resource space). Will go through the rest of your points as well to see what else to improve, thanks again for the write up!