You /can/ zoom in, and turn off the UI to just see spaceships in space blowing each other up, and it is beautiful. However, the spreadsheet view with zoomed out camera is more efficient for actually getting things done, which is why all the serious players in serious battles do that.

(It would be really nice if some of the big alliances could spare one guy to be dedicated cameraman when landmark events happen, but I'm not aware of anyone doing that :P)

They often do, it makes for great material for propaganda videos. It's easier to do for pre-planned battles though, and/or they may have felt they didn't want to spare any ships and risk sacrificing firepower. Or most likely just nobody thought of it.

Well, one could argue that Star Wars-like battles are completely unrealistic, because in the future aiming systems will become so good that it will be nearly impossible to miss, so a battle might as well take place like it does in Eve, where the only thing that counts is the strength of your weapons vs. strength of their shields. It's not like you can do a quick evasive maneuver in a super carrier like that - although I am pretty sure that fighter battles still have them moving around since it's on a much smaller scale.

Very true, however would we want to watch Star Wars with no human element? Why are there pilots at all, should just be a bunch of R2D2s built into drone ships :P

I feel the same about playing a game, I want to have some influence besides my stat column being bigger.

Obviously the game must be fun to get the kind of following it has, I guess I was just expecting something else.

Eve is a point&click MMORPG. To pilot a ship you basically activate modules when you need to and choose where to fly to and what to shoot at from a list.

In practice, it's more exiting than it sounds, but not by much. The game is about dealing with other people, trying to work together for some common goal, or trying to clean them out, and never knowing what the other side is up to.