Purchased the game a week ago loved it, particularly learning through building ships that can overcome the challenges of the mission. Have played my way through to scenario 8, the pre dreadnought conflict, which I was struggling to win. In the last couple of days after learning more about building better ships and matching components etc., I went back and replayed the earlier ones, I expected to do a better job given my learning. However they have got much more difficult, for the reasons outlined by others in this thread. It's at a stage just now that it seems a waste of time playing which is sad.
One thing that did surprise me at the end of my 1st battle was the total anticlimax at the end, just a you won/lost.
I had expected an anarak's analysis of hits shells fired by gun type etc., etc., I don't know if the devs have analysis of this in a debugger or something to aid the balancing process, but it crosses my mind that such statistics could be a valuable source of statistics to help balancing and tuning the game and provide some more concrete for feedback from this community.