So you are an Admin? Cool.
Elite? I've not heard of it. I will look it up. I agree, landing on planets is cool. In fact I tried the demo of Evechron Mercenary, and the best thing about it was that it was absolutely breathtaking landing on a planet.
Concerning Eve, it was pretty in a dark sort of way, and it had this eerie Blade Runner-esque ambiance, but from what I saw the ship combat is no where near as intricate as STO, the interface was clunky, and again, that game has to have the most hostile and elitist community I've ever encountered.
Revisiting STO after a year, I think it has improved from a 7 to an 8. The ground combat used to be very clunky, but now it is almost as much fun as the ship combat. Yes, although the randomly-generated missions are better than they were, they still not quite there yet. You will still occasionally get one that entails, as you said, beaming down to a planet, running around and clicking a couple of alien devices, then beaming back up to ship. To be fair though, sometimes the visuals of these planets are quite beautiful. Also, you are correct in that since STO is not a sandbox like Eve, you never quite feel as if you are at war with the Klingons. Still in all though, as I recall from last year I thought the Klingon science ship required a different approach than its Fed counterpart, and I liked how the duty officers missions were in keeping with an 'evil empire'.
Also, the capital planet Qu'nos to me looked like Mordor. lol
My current favorite science ship toy, the energy siphon: