I absolutely love the game, but I've never been able to get into the advanced edition - I feel hacking is unfun whether you are using it or are on the receving end. Same thing with pulsars and mind control.

On the other hand it's frustrating to miss out on the Lanius and all the new ship layouts.

So: the question is this: Is there a way to turn things from the Advanced Edition on or off? I find the number of mods for FTL a bit overwhelming, so apologies in advance if I've missed out on something.

You don't have to do hacking if you don't want to - and the non-advanced edition still has situations where you can be hacked (I believe), the difference in advanced is you can mitigate the effects if you have a high enough hacking unit.

Pulsars have always been a thing, they're definitely super annoying.

Mind control AFAIK doesn't seem to be used on you - unless you count the occasional event with slugs, and again I'm pretty sure they existed before AE. And again if you don't want to use it, then don't buy it - but personally I find it can be quite useful, e.g. using it on a pilot will massively reduce the ship's ability to evade your shots.

Technically you could probably mod the stuff out yourself, but it'd be a pain. I advise you to just go for AE, and just avoid the stuff you don't like as much as possible. Then if/when you feel like it, give some of the AE stuff a shot - I orginally hated clone bays, thinking that med bays were way better - but they're definitely pretty good, they just need to be used differently.