Freespace 2 isn't that great. It's a nice little space flight sim, but not the end all be all space flight sim. Hell, it's five years old now and Interplay is re-releasing it at full price because they know there are people out there dumb enough to pay full price for a collector's edition.
Personally, I'd go with Hardwar over FreeSpace 2 any day, but that's mainly because I'm not a huge fan of mission based space games. Gimme the open ended ones any day.
That said, you can get Universal Combat for $20 right now, and it has gobs more stuff than FreeSpace 2 did. It's open ended. You can train your marines to do things. For example, I was talking with a friend of mine who trained a marine to salute every time the marine made a kill. While not the most useful thing to spend time training your grunts to do, it does demonstrate a pretty neat learning feature of the AI. You can fly a fighter in to an enemy ship, damaging it - eject at the last minute, fly your pilot to the enemy ship, board it, and steal one of their fighters to have your escape!
