Huh. Are there parts of game play that showcased the different positions any? It kinda sounds like the weapons officer was the only person really playing the game.
That depends on your perspective. I do agree that the weapons position is "front-loaded" in that the job has most of the kick.
The engineer sends out repair teams to fix stuff, and allocates power. Technically he can shut down any of the other stations by denying them power.
the helm steers and that's pretty much it. he needs the coordinates from the science station in order to know what bearing to set for as he only has a local map (short range, rather than the full space sector map).
the science officer gets to scan ships and stuff.
The communications officer gets to hail enemy ships, and command the star bases to make stuff. That's useful for reloading our weapons bay.
In a pinch, you only need the weapons and helm positions, which shows where the imbalance is.
However, the game is evolving, and it is working to add more fun to the other positions.
Since the game is heavily combat focused, the emphasis is on finding the red dots and killing them. We didn't dilly dally about, and so the ship got to each red dot quickly and we killed them quickly thanks to my efficient weapons officer who didn't wait for orders to open fire or raise shields because we were in a wartime situation.
I would have liked to see a variety of activities, like exploring new planets etc.
to be clear, we played the default combat missions. The game can have scripts for new missions added to it, many of which have some star trek flavor to them. We didn't try those.