There were way too many moving parts in this Special for the typical time-crunch you end up facing. I was on the player side, and while my party made it through (and with only some minor difficulty that had more to do with a GM that lacked rules knowledge than actual encounter difficulty), it was a terrible special.
Really cool concept... poor execution. There was way too much going on, and story-wise, it felt like we got very, very little from it. Beyond essentially being Pathfinders in space, it kind of felt like we had no idea what was going on half the time. It seemed very difficult for the GM to communicate the important story-aspects to us. Couple that with the fact that our GM wasn't clued in on some really basic rules (climbing rules using ropes, for example), and this ended up being a snooze fest for us. It's been my absolute least favorite special so far, and was the first special some of my friends played in (I honestly hope they believed me when I told them other specials have been WAY better, and to give it a chance next year). The combats were pretty meh, and the skill checks felt really repetitive.
I love the massive feel of the specials, but you don't have to add a ton of extra pointless encounters/skill checks to make it interesting. In my experience, most GMs do better when they can worry more about the story and less about having to prep a ridiculous number of encounters and random elements that may not even come in to play.
Overall, tone down the randomness of the encounters and perhaps the number of them, and reduce the repetitive skill checks. Give the GMs a chance to actually communicate with us beyond rushing us off to the next encounter. If I just wanted to grind exp, I'd go play WoW. As a fairly new (to Society) player, I feel like I got way more out of the specials last year.
Here's to hoping for something amazing at GenCon 50.