Someone in the Steam discussion was saying that some of the pirates are triggered by events, and are part of the lore story, and are thus not controlled by the startup settings…
Yep, that's precisely what Erik said in his response to my query about it in the Matrix forums. Guess I'll try firing up a new game with pirates turned completely off and see what happens.
make sense if true but still seems a bit much right at the start.
Agreed.
(to share one of ojsdad's frustrations) that there doesn't appear to be a single screen from which I can order X number of Z ship type to be built, and instead I have to go a specific facility and manually queue some up.
Found it! Top right of the screenshot with the green box around it
This doesn't seem to be working at all. I've tried it a couple of times, but no ships seem to be getting queued up.
I thought I had the same problem at first - are you clicking "purchase" after queuing up the ships? Nothing gets built until you do, but I've just confirmed it's working for me.
For myself, yes I did finally find that screen. And yes, I did figure I had to click "purchase" in order to actually get the ships built.
I feel, however, that perhaps the Purchase button could/should be better highlighted. It's maybe fine if (like me) you've played DW:U before, or even other complex strategy games -- and even then, some folks are still going to struggle -- but you're likely to be a lost boy/girl otherwise.
[You are correct, though, that there's no way to re-base a fleet. What you can do is select the fleet (therefore all the ships will be selected in a group), disband it, then click create fleet again. However I don't know what logic it uses to choose what will be the new base. When I did it, the base went from the planet to the star port in orbit.
Oy. That almost gives me a headache just reading your description of that.
It's a textbook example of how DW2 currently feels so rough, even setting aside the usual issues a game often deals with just after release. There is absolutely zero reason why re-basing a fleet shouldn't already be a function in the game. The lack of said feature is especially baffling when DW2 is obviously trying to compete with Stellaris, which of course has had the re-basing function for fleets since the very beginning. I just don't get it.
After researching colonisation tech I scratched my head for ages wondering how to build a colony ship. Turns out you need to research another tech (something like small civilian vessels) to get access to the colony ship hull. You'd think one would be a prerequisite for the other, wouldn't you? 
Anyway, hopefully this saves someone else the bafflement.
Heh. Yes, that would make sense.
I have started noticing that tech requirements are not always very straightforward; I feel like they could've been/could be laid out a little better.
I think I've found a bug regarding resource abundancies. I literally watched with my own eyes as an exploration ship surveyed an asteroid. It definitely said it had about 3% Mebnar and nothing else. However I then got a pop-up suggestion that we build a mining base there because it has 13% steel and 12% Mebnar! I said yes anyway, then popped back over to the asteroid, selected it, and once again it said 3% Mebnar. So which is it?!
Hmm, that one's new to me; at the very least, I've not noticed it so far. You might want to report that bug in the forums.
