Yeah, I think the pacing could use some tweaks.
Honestly, the mission cycle should be slower (I shouldn't be able to swing control of an entire nation in a month!), and UI improvements would speed up play (needs summary screens for targeting missions and stuff instead of scrolling around on the very pretty maps), but the biggest thing would be an aurora style event log+"skip to next mission cycle"+interrupts.
They already sort of have the event log (it summarizes the outcomes of your missions from the last cycle), and they already do interrupts in the form of autopause on certain events. Just need to be able to skip time as fast as your computer can compute and things would speed up dramatically (the max speed, 5x, is still kind of slow).