Hmm,

has been working on SteemNova's new look for several weeks now.

That's a little too big words ;) I am self-learning about divs, and code and else by trying to made Steemnova interface a little more useable especially on smaller screens. this is how login page looks right now on my phone for example:

But dont think that i am a programer or that i am "dev" of the Steemnova2" :P

OK, so lets talk about SN2. First I would like to talk about 2 simultaneous Uni, as a lot of comments here talk about it.
In my opinion it would be extremely bad idea. Maybe we should make poll about it, i dont know, but really it is the worst thing we could do. I understand that some ppl want to continue with their empire that was started, but, this will dived players base and make game less fun. What is more, it would be harder to have rewards for two Unis. What is even more, more is that it would be harder for devs to control and react for problems with 2 unis. Remember that this was never comerrcial projects, and devs didn't earn anything on this game (well maybe some upvotes from posts heh). Please lets abond this idea, and lets make one great Univers with new, better Steemnova.

About changes.

Restart is good, but not enough, I think, that the best change we could do for game is to install in it some trigger that would eventually shot down Universe. in chat with @mys he proposed that we should add new special very expensive building that when it will be finished it will end the game. This should also be made with change of the reward system. The main reward should be for player, and his alliance who will build this. I in the other hand thought about something more dramatically like special event triggered by detecting that there are for example more than 50 Death Stars in the game. The event would mean that there will be deployed a massive alien fleet. And players have to choose if they wont to defend this fleet or to fight with it. Fighting and winning would mean that the Uni is still active (and waiting for next trigger for example with 200 DS), defending it and winning would mean that the Uni stops. In this case, there is no need to change the way of rewarding ppl. But i like more Mys idea. either way we need to make game have "seasons", so there will never be again problem with endgame time when fleets of thousands DS are flying in universe what is absurd, and IMO not very fun, at least for most players, also it would give better chance to have a chance to earn 1st reward.

Lets go to the Tokens thing.
I dont understand it clearly. Or maybe we dont have many details here :P so i dont know. Why pay and earn in new token instead of steem? I was thinking some time ago that it would be fun if we would make DM a token, and it would work similarly to token that was implement into the SteemMonsters game. It can be named like you want :P just making new tokens to buy DM is hm waste of time? Just convert DM into token! :P BUT to make this happen and have some logic, for me at least, we should introduce more changes in the game itself. So the token should be used to buy resources, IMO it would destroy ingame balance. It should be used only for buying "chest". The chest would give us some random cards that would be used to activate and upgrade our officers (so also boosts). Cards should be users property and it should be written on the blockchain. There should be like it is in SM, possibility to convert cards into DM.
Buying temporary boost with DM would be ok I think.
Of course it would be great if with DM (or how else we name it) we could buy in some shops, or in other games, I support this very much :P
And: "good player will get token for free, i am against it."
DM should be or bought on the market, or earn with exploration system (like it is earn in SM with fightings), maybe with fewer numbers, and even less probability then it is now. It could lead to bot abuse if we would give token for "good players". Explorations also can be abused by bot farms, but with bot farms we need to handle either way. With bot abusing ranking i mean that greed will lead that ppl instead of playing for fun will made bots that will play for them just to earn something, it would kill a lot of fun in game.

Steem Keychain - great, but not instead of steemconect. You cant use steemkeychain on the mobile phone.

Events are great, but I suppose that they will be menage more or less by human, are you prepared for that? :> :P

Statistics - great, but keeping some useful data on the blockchain is not enough in my opinion. We should really make this cards :P

Support for new players - good, but i think more important for new players would some guide which will show new ppl how to play this game and what they should do, and this "tutorial" should contain some rewards system (DM and resources), like it is in all nowadays games.

OF COURSE i know that this is easy to write about everything, but not so easy to make such changes. BUT if we really want SN2, we should make this properly, so we won't have to make SN3 in next year :P
But maybe my thinking is wrong, and we should improve what we can now, and next things we will change when the right time comes ;)