Advice/Experience with Eclipse Phase

[Tome]

Every action the players tried to take was undocumented in the rules, every situation had to be fiated (even with thorough looking through the rulebooks - my GM is no light reader). It was torture from beginning to end.

Mind providing some examples of something that needs more rules than 'make a test with the relevant skill to determine if you succeed or fail' and doesn't have them? I've yet to find anything like that in the rules myself and the examples you've stated are either quite obviously erroneous from just a brief look through the book or based on a lack of understanding of what hard scifi implies.

To wit, there are no rules for space dogfights because those are horribly unrealistic. Real space combat would be more along the lines of automated weapons platforms sniping each other from beyond visual range - kind of cool in it's own way, but not something you can do anything with on a personal scale.

Similarly, there are no rules for magicking up stuff in a simulspaces because things don't work that way. You can totally hack a simulspace if you want to, but it's just like hacking any other program. You don't need specialised rules for hacking spacefuture!WoW or messing up somebody's workspace. 'I want to hack the simulspace!' you say, rolling Infosec. You succeed, and the GM describes everyone else quitting because nobody feels like playing with some cheating noob - shortly followed by a notification from a mod about you breaching the terms of service and your ensuing ban. Because that's what hacking a simulspace is - it's hacking an online game, and it's not particularly significant what that actually lets you do in most cases.

You seem to be looking for Star Wars and the Matrix. Both great franchises and very entertaining, but the stuff they show is very much on the soft end of scifi. While Eclipse Phase is similarly very much towards the harder end of the scifi spectrum. You went in expecting this and this and were disappointed because the game is actually more about this and this.

Oh, and for something so obviously modelled after Ghost in The Shell, why can't we do realtime hacking? Why does it take so damn long? That makes hacking so much less cool. And hacking not being cool in a cyberpunk setting? Not cool.

Intuitive Cracking trait from Transhuman + Mental Speed/Multi-Tasking implants + Speed boosting implants. Use any combination of those and you can easily reduce the time for brute-force hacking down to 2 rounds.

So yes, you can in fact do combat hacking. Unless the other guy notices and turns off his mesh connection.