When you finish the vanilla part of the game, will you release the tools you used for things like making scenarios, ship hulls, AI ships, etc? This question may have been asked to death but I am really hoping that you do release them, as the makeshift way of text editing takes way too long for my tastes.
i second that request. 
Thirded, with emphasis! Going thru those textfiles and making microscopic little tweaks until my eyes feel like boiled onions is NOT fun. 
The results are impressively cool, but the process is drudgery galore.
YEAH! BRING ON THE TOOLS!
The tools are a bit crap right now. What I might do is add some sort of command line switch to enable secret dev tools so people can use them who really want to, without any kind of implication that they are bug free or user friendly. In the long run, I’ll make them work better, if only so I can eventually do a proper expansion apck without that text editing hell myself 