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I was recently reassigning some harvesters from one route to another and I noticed that this didn't occur until I went to galaxy view and then went back to the sector where the harvesters were. This then canceled the previous route and allowed me to assign the route I wanted, just feels a little bit clunky and I imagine this is unintentional.
Let me preface this by saying I am really impressed with the technical scope and depth of this game. I really hope you guys get a critical mass of players to keep it interesting.
Along the lines of what the OP mentions above, the biggest problem with the game, in my opinion, is how loosely coupled the client UI feels to whatever machinations are going on server side. I understand completely that the game is running entirely on the server, and that's fine, but I feel like the client isn't doing a great job of reflecting that fact. Many operations either give no immediate feedback as to the result, or give some UI feedback that is effectively false until the server "catches up" to the user. I am thinking mostly about creating and canceling ship orders, but also updates around ships in transit, etc.
I don't care so much that an operation is delayed (I understand the technical challenges of having the client-server interaction be totally synchronous), but what I would like to see, if there is going to be some delay in updating a cancel order, for example, is some feedback in the UI acknowledging that I have submitted an order and that the server is "working on it." Otherwise I have no idea if my request was even registered, if the server is having a problem, if an update is pending, etc. This makes it really frustrating dealing with situations like the OP describes, because you start to feel like the UI is no longer meaningfully reflecting the state of the game.
Also, I'd love to see a transit time indicator so I have some idea how long a ship is going to take to get to its destination.
Other than that, keep up the great work.