Some of the the most tedious and sometimes frustrating battles in Bonetown involved 18 guys mobbing you at once, when you had close-range weapons that you had to spam hit over and over again. I'm hoping that the gameplay involves more strategy.
I know where you're coming from in regards to combat in BoneTown. To be honest, I found myself just spamming the lightning attack over and over again towards the end to handle the huge grouping of mobs (basically, for the 1-2 stun it provided to allow for a slight retreat or a free melee whack).
I feel the same way about combat in BoneTown. I always ended up spamming the special attacks since melee at times could be overwhelming especially against groups. The gun combat is looking nice though, just having some range will help greatly. I think I remember an interview from some point in time talking about having allies in combat and deciding whether they pillage or attack. No idea if that made it into the final game but I remember that being talked about.

I was also thinking that like the Fantasy Room from BoneTown, the "hub" would be constantly upgraded with rewards from completing missions. A "trophy" room, holding cells where you can revisist your "conquests", etc. This method would make it feel a little bit more dynamic rather than a separate portion of the game that you have to load up separately from your main playthrough in order to access.
I really like this idea. The separate fantasy room in Bonetown could have been a nice mini-game, in which your achievements unlock models, toys, sex acts, etc. Because it's also a fantasy room, there could be all kinds of whacky fantasies, like the Borg girl easter egg in BT. I'd love to feel like I accomplished my mission, and then go to the fantasy room to relax and earn an additional reward and surprise, like getting to do batgirl or three-breasted alien.
I'd love to see this sort of stuff in the game though obviously now it would be too late to implement anything not already present. I'm mostly just hoping for the ship to have some use as an area and not just a mission hub. It would however be really nice to have that upgrade system. It would be really neat to customize your weapons, armor, even your squad mates.

After watching the aforementioned trailer I'm also wondering about the story. All we really know this time around is we are looking for an elf brothel. I'm sure D-Dub has a good journey planned and I'm hungry for some more info about it. Also having only played scarce amounts of Warcraft and Starcraft I'm not really sure what locations we might visit or missions we might do. All I've seen is the village raiding but a call back to the RTS and RPG roots could be really engaging.