Thanks for the feedback, we are glad you enjoyed the game! We are definitely going to keep working on it, so any feedback we get is precious.
Having to constantly be aware of the HUD more than the actual gameplay was a problem I too noticed while play testing and we might work out a way to fix that.
"I often found that time was passing even when I thought I was far enough away from things. It seems like as long as an object is on sxreen it's killing time": Objects only kill time when you orbit them, you could be going with very high speeds and therefore be losing time. There is no indication of your actual speed though, on that you are correct. The speed bar represents only the speed that the ship's booster provides, not the one that the orbital acceleration provides. That is likely something that needs tweaking.
"Also with no indication of where the galaxies or whatever those are you can slam into two or three before you even realize it at decent speeds.": Do you mean the pink/purple galaxies in the background? Those are purely decorative, they are supposed to be very far away and don't cost any time ;). You commenting that however does tell me that someone could consider these as large objects to be avoided, which is not something we want. We were planning to redesign the background anyway, so that's another excuse to do that.