As to the game telling you how much damage you are doing. Well, I don't think it's part of the game's design to spoon feed you that information. It kind of pushes you to be more situationally aware of whats happening around you. Besides, you can gauge how much damage is being done to the ship by the visual state its in. Ships appear more ravaged the lower permanent hull they have. It's pretty cool, and I don't think the game needs an arcadey indication of damage values.
That way, as it should be - when you're duking it out with another ship, it's difficult to tell who has the upper hand health wise (unless the other ship is getting really truly pounded), so sometimes that leads to people taking the risk of toughing it out in order to put out as much dps as possible, running away, or pulling off some fancy flying.
