On the contrary, it enhances the immersion and the game feels more in your control. I now find myself automatically wanting to pause other games that do not have this feature and being momentarily surprised at its absence. The gameplay we created in Away Team is intentionally very straightforward and action oriented with the primary and secondary objectives specifically detailed. This is to emphasize the strategy of Team Selection before the mission has even begun. If the in-game objectives could change too much from the briefing information, we felt that it wouldn't allow for accurate decisions to be made in selecting the initial team.
Some characters look a lot like known characters.
In retrospect, I wish we had done something else with Quint besides the facial tattoo. It was cool on paper, but we should have done something else to make him more distinguished besides that. It had been done. As far as the Captain and Slovaak are concerned, I just wanted to make some cool characters. I personally do not see many similarities between them and the characters you named besides their being black.