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@moth
OK, I admit i never put that much time into 2, but there was just a certain magic that Homeworld had for me that it's sequels lacked. Maybe something to do with imagination filling in for the limits of the original's technology, then in the sequels they filled in the blanks a bit more, but in ways that didn't live up to my hopes.
But also it's down to details like the way the maps worked. The original's limited map screen constantly pushed you back into a ship-bound view of the action and hid the map's edges, making the ships and the space feel huge. In the sequels the map screen gained a lot of obvious functionality, and suffered for it as the game became a battle played-out between icons on a cramped board with obvious boundaries. Suddenly everything felt small.
One of the best mods for the original gave you a ship's eye view (just a camera mode). Rather than getting more god-like and detached, they should have gone in that direction: modelled the ship's bridges and let you stand on them and made you view the map from their nav-screens. (But maybe that's just me - ever since the battlezone remake i've had a real lust for good first-person RTSs.)
Another major gripe was the way formations and tactics changed. The original's system was complex and clunky, but powerful once you'd got the hang of setting up number-key groups and building micro-formations and chains of follow orders. The sequels just seemed to dumb it all down.
Did you ever play 1 online? The fighter tactics proved to have a lot of depth, most of which seemed lost or over-simplified in the sequels. (I assume you know about death-balls, crazy scouts, and how to hyperspace fighters and corvettes?)
Homeworld 1 seemed a little cautious of using the 3rd dimension too much, and i hoped the sequels would polish up the interface a bit and make more of it, but again they went the other way.