Gave it a pretty significant shot.

Shrugged through the FS1 campaign and loved it. Tried Silent Threat Reborn. Went through 13 minutes of an excruciatingly long mission after more excruciatingly long and difficult missions and somehow got labeled a traitor and failed the mission because a fighter flew in front of me while dogfighting in a pitched battle.

No. Just no.

You should try the mod Beyond the Redline. It's a total conversion for FSOpen that puts you into a Viper from Battlestar Galactica. A bit difficult to pilot when you first start off as it also includes vertical thrusters and inertia from what I remember, but the feel of BSG is definitely there.

My big issue with FSO, and a lot of space sims for that matter, is just the frustration of having to redo the same inane segment over and over.

A screw up because the game's AI is reckless should not be pinned on me demanding I redo the entire mission. It's infuriating and just wastes my time.

A lot of games for example would add "gamey" elements to deal with limitations in the engine such as turning off friendly fire.

I installed all 45GB of mods from the FSO installer, but I'm just really not convinced that the time investment is worth the frustration, which is really unfortunate because I love the gunplay.

I don't remember Reborn being particularly different in that regard from the main campaign.

The game is old though and I'm not sure if FS2O improves the AI or not. At least, I didn't notice much change in it's behaviour. The AI is from a time period when it'd typically do silly things like it does now.

It's one of those things you need to cope with, I guess.