why was this more playable in beta?

I think they need to redesign the box art so the whole thing is a giant asterisk and then in giant letters it'll say: "PERFORMANCE WILL VARY".

agreed, performance has certainly improved once the game is underway but now it can be quite hit or miss rendering the planets at the start, and I take longer to load up in the lobby too, not that that matters per se. i7 16gb ram GTX760 and 76/35mb connection so its not the specs that's doing it, maybe my eyes are just taking longer to process the images.

Its common. As you pile on more and more code. Stuff runs worse. thus it has to be optimized.

Even a game like mincraft was running horrible because of all the stuff thats been added and changed over the years.

Thats just how it goes. But yeah optimization has a long way to go, or at least the server backend does. if we are supposed to play with 1000's - 10.000's. 100.000's of units in a game