To the original poster, it sounds like you would do well to do two things:

1. Get the replayer and watch some recorded games to see how good players do it. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million.

2. Play skrimishes. You will be more free to explore the game at your pace that way instead of jumping through the hoops that the campaign designers set up for you.

3. *DO* expect there to be a learning curve, so have a cool head when dealing with it. There are fan sites as well as walk-throughs out there which can teach you a lot about basic starting strategies and, even better, discuss how and why they work in detail. Try tauniverse, for one.

I think the hardest thing in TA for any new player to get grips with is the economy. It's quite unforgiving (although a lot nicer than the horrid micromanagement beast that is economy in Supcom/Forged Alliance). It would also explain why the OP is getting beaten blue by an easy TA AI.

Try a few games in Skirmish with a lot of extra energy and mass to start with - you'll find that it gives you a lot of slop to learn how to actually get a productive economy. Playing on Metal maps help too because you're never short on mass.

You can always play a 2v2 with the AI as well, turn on the shared vision cheats or turn Fog off. It might help you get a basic feel a bit faster.

Not really, I don't have to micromanage 4 types of construction unit in SC, and orders can be changed on the fly without erasing them. Not to mention the idle engineer icon is very useful.

Upgrades are micromanaging to a degree, yes, but I'd prefer that to having to build seperate structures (Mohos and Adv unit plants come to mind).

That's because in Forged Alliance, you can't sit there spamming Moho Metal Makers any more :p you have to expand early and launch raids against your opponent. Aside from the higher unit counts and Experimentals.

Personally I'm the other way round about RTS games. TA was my first RTS and no other one compares.

I noticed that the AI was really, really susceptible to rush tactics and sort of quit playing the game at that point. I had a hard time doing well when I tried playing around with the interesting options I had. When I took a brute force approach I won easily.

Obviously it'd be different in multiplayer, but I don't do multiplayer.

Try out Switecks Mostly Harmless v16 or Queller AI TA & CC v17 together with Switecks TA Bugfix. This will certainly give you a more challenging computer opponent.