Dragon Controls: the right-click for the jetpack is intended for strafing to dodge projectiles (not that it helps much when they home in and there are a zillion coming at you at once), the space bar is for forward flight, although I did notice that using the right-click when not currently moving is the same as the space bar.
It is intentional that you cannot control production while as a Dragon because they don't want you to be able to stay in Dragon mode all the time. However, the production queues are unlimited, so that issue is alleviated if you remember to spam the button to produce units a lot before transforming.
The political management side is only intended for the single-player campaign. It isn't really compatible with multiplayer because one person can wander the ship at your leisure, talk to people an make decisions, meanwhile, there's another guy sitting there on the campaign map who doesn't care about all that waiting who knows how long for you to finish up whatever else you're doing. The campaign map already lets players hang around just thinking about troop movement and research.
A lot of people here have echoed your comments on the RTS mode being too fast -
it was even the subject of one of Swen's blog entries.
I think I have to agree. There are all kinds of potential tactics that the game theoretically provides for, but just aren't that reasonable in gameplay because of the speed. You can plant mines, but the cooldown is 20 seconds between plantings, and there's so much terrain you need to cover that it's no good.
Units have all kinds of special abilities, but it's hard to micro them in combat, although I am getting better at that.
