I'd put every new race alongside them, except the Exquivans and perhaps the Owa.

What happened to the Melnorme? Why are the Kzer-Za except those under Zor-Ath's direct control dressing up as Kohr-Ah and making Marauders? It just didn't fit together.

The only thing is, I wish that the bifurcator had worked. The Chenjesu were cool. But the entire idea was lame.

Haha, Owa had the maddest ships. It was an earthling Cruiser on drugs, absoloutely pwned Kohr-Ah Marauders.

Melnorme may just simply not have been trading in that part of the galaxy, or they were in the human part of the galaxy because they had some other interest like there was ancient tech or information or secret sources that is not in the quadrant in SC3. Nobody knows actually what the Melnorme are up too so I wouldn't assume that they would just tag along.

The colony management in SC3 was really awful, and since colonies were your main source of ships, crew and fuel, this was my biggest problem with the game. While it was cool to be able to concentrate on building up the colonies of races with ships that you liked, the colonies took a LONG time to into productive worlds.

Most of the new races were plain boring or remakes of races from SC2. The Daktaklakpak, for instance, seemed pretty much like new versions of the Slylandro Probes. Some of the old favorite races were just not in the game.

The 3D super-melee was a lark. It was not really 3D, just an isometric view of the battlefield which actually made it harder to control your ship and target the enemy accurately. The ship models were jazzed up a bit, though.

Also, the final battle and ultimate climax of the game was pretty underwhelming.

Yeh, colony management was pretty bad from memory all those years ago. Trick to getting new colonies going was basically taking well established colonies and putting a big number of them onto a new colony to get it running, once they both leveled out at a higher population you could repeat the process for a new colony untill you could almost make new colonies at full strength from just pop from other worlds IIRC.

SC3 in my opinion was a good game, not as good as SC2 but it had its own merits. The Melee was good enough (just turn off 3d mode) and lets face it, SC3 was pretty funny at points. The K'tang, Dooge, Daktaklakpak and the like were very memorable races that I would love to see in any new game, not just in character but their ships were good.

My bigger issue was with melee was a lot of "mine laying" style ships came into play and a lot of auto-tracking weapons from the Crux races. Sure, there was a lack of them in SC2 beyond the Marauders and so forth but then we had the K'tang and Daktaklakpak spamming them out of their behinds like nothing else across a map.

I guess the insult, from Rand, was that the VUX were ugly. However,
the VUX reveal later that there is another reason (a deeper reason)
why they don't like humans:

I quote:

But now you have forced us to reveal our REAL reason for hating you humans
an embarrassing reason with no acceptable justification, but nonetheless undeniable!
Human! You are SOOO ugly, SOOO hideous to us that we will NEVER be able to find peace with your species!
Whenever we see your kind, we just want to kick you!... stomp on you!... squish you!...
...vaporize your ugly faces from the entire universe!
We know its unreasonable! We know that you had no choice about how you look!
We know that it is cruel fate that the Creator made you appear like putrid excretion
but WE JUST CAN'T HANDLE IT!
Why right now, because of your insufferable wretchedness
I am faced with a grotesque choice: keep talking to you and regurgitate uncontrollably
or break off communication and attack your vessel...

end quote

Thats SC3 fluff tho. Because SC3 was made by different people and chucked out a lot of the SC2 ideas and storylines, things like that (especially such a cop-out thing) are not considered cannon by some.