I do every few months, right after forgetting what I'm doing. LOL
I've never gotten to the point of building stations, which I regret. It's pretty fun following the story and horsing around some on your own. You can beat down ships just short of destroying them, the crew bails and then you can leave your ship to claim it. You can set your fleet to automated duties while you do your thing, but that's about the point I get sidetracked with something else and I don't learn to make good use of that.

Get the cockpit mod if you go with X3:TC, see the big sticky thread for info. I throw in some cheats sometimes too, to get moving again. There's a nice menu style mod for that.
I don't bother with my flightstick, the game is better suited to kb/m IMO.

The videos show you what you can do pretty well. Plus the cool soundtrack.
These are for X3:R, but same thing. TC has far better controls than the mess of menus from R.