From a Steam review.... Compared with MOO2 this remake has:
- less preconfigured races
- less possibilities for building your race
- nearly no ship design
- no Antaranes
- no planetary leaders
- no ship leaders
- semms to be smaller science tree

What else is missing? Any elements missing??

Conclusion:
I will go with MOO2 and wait 'till MOO5 (hopefully this will be a real worthy successor!)
BTW you get MOO2 her at GOG as well - so give it a try at least!

All of this is correct.
The game is still good however and fun.
But it feels like an early draft, like it's still in beta.
Like a lot of content is still missing.
If they don't rework the tech tree and racial trait options i will stop playing the game soon, because there is no replay value (see my thread for more info on this).
If they don't add more races that are missing from MoO2 i will be very disappointed, but let's be honest - they won't add them.

No planetary and ship leaders is sad, but not that bad in terms of gameplay.
I just can't find a reason as to why you wouldn't have the feature in the game.

So if anybody owns neither game and looks for the best one then definitly buy MoO2 instead of this.

Edit:
- nearly no ship design

this actually isn't really correct, you can modify your ships about as much as you could in MoO2 and i'm ok with the current state.
The thing that bothers me more is that you can't tell how much it actually matters to design your ships.
I feel like your choices had much more impact in MoO2.

Hmm. Can't comment too much on the new MoO, but almost everything you listed there are things that I really disliked about MoO2 compared to the original. MoO2 was new and flashy when it came out, but I was back to playing the original after a few years of MoO2. Every game is the same, you get the same tech each time, and the creative trait was the worst idea ever to be in a 4x game.

In short, I like the fact they seemed to go more with the original than MoO2 for the new one...

Actually you can have all techs from the tech tree - you have to use the Psilons or build your own race.

There are also some things i dislike in MoO2. But I really like the heros/leaders. So imho not having leaders is a BIG disadvantage in the new MoO!