I play too, and concur with your assessment.

It's a little bit of a shame because the ground combat does have some interesting mechanics (expose/exploit, for instance), but it's just a little too RPG-like and laggy to work well as a first-person shooter.

Pro-tip: prioritize ground speed for your endeavour rewards because the faster you run the quicker you can complete ground daily TFOs.

It tried to capture the feeling of missions from some of the older Star Trek games, but it being an MMO kind of ruined that for me. Maybe it's better now with more improvements and less people running through the newbie areas like in the first days, but it threw me off. Ship parts were the best. Honestly I was looking for an online version of Starfleet Command, which even SFO didn't quite have the nuances of.

Wait, better than either Armada and Elite Force?

I still feel like the ground combat was an after thought added to pad the game. I stopped playing it over a year ago and even then it still felt janky