I just want to play with 6+ empires at start, all spoilers, and with a high generation chance without getting a slowdown. To me those other features, while nice and very useful, are somewhat secondary.
This x1000. I'm gaming on a pretty decent rig* and Aurora can be painfully sluggish. And I know most of that stems from the VB/Access combo. Even with no new features, a code refactoring/language re-write and a database switch should be a godsend for speed.
*Core i7-4770, SSD drive, 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX 650 Ti 2GB, running Lubuntu Linux with Aurora in Wine.