spore eruption and the infinitely respawning attack drones

[Warped Realities]

Both of these I find. How to put this, unfun.

Spore eruption. Lets see, some derelicts have floaters on them..floaters can't be taken out by point defence because they have silly amounts of hp. Once they land they deploy an infernally hard to hit proto hive thing that when hit will cause someone to get sick and starve to death. Ie, every single one of them has the chance to unavoidably kill one of my crew. I don't exactly have a ton of crew to spare for that.

Attack drones, quite frankly when I see an attack drone spawner on a derelict I just leave. They respawn in record time when destroyed, hunt shuttles, are immune to ship to ship artillery. You can't destroy them from inside the derelict either.

So yeah, these are the things that have made me stop playing, Because they come across as mean spirited.

[Wantoomany]

Sounds like you need some fighters.

[Batfish J. Macaque]

Firstly when entering a system with derelicts it's advisable to park your ship at least 3 or 4 squares away as it seems the further away you are the longer it takes the nasties to notice you.
When your ship has materialised go and look at the derelicts to see if they have any alien limpets or bot launchers. The bot launchers often don't appear immediately but when they do they can be destroyed with conventional weapons (ie. the weapons you can use against other ships).
The alien limpets on the other hand are impervious to conventional weapons and can only be damaged by PD turrets and fighters. Ideally you want to send a couple of fighters over to wake them up and they should deal with it before it reaches your ship, even one fighter and a couple of well placed PD turrets should do the job.
(I've seen derelicts with 4 or 5 limpets on them so if you encounter one of those and you're not armed to the teeth with fighters and PD turrets I would suggest running away as fast as you can.)

Dealing with an infestation
If your ship does get infested then draft your best shooter (or best two or three if they're not very good) and sent them to the nearest airlock and have them put on a space suit (I've seen some suggest that suits don't stop infection but my crew has walked though several spore clouds on derelicts and never been infected) then send the crew member(s) to the 'proto hive'. At this point it might be worth drafting the rest of the crew and sending them to stand somewhere far away as they seem to have an annoying habit of deciding to wander through the area at the worst possible time.
Once your shooter(s) arrive at the location position them so they have a clear line of sight to the target and have them kneel to improve their aim.
Shoot the target until it dies and releases it's spore cloud.
This should be job done but sometimes there's a smaller node on the wall that you have to shoot to make the alien growth start disappearing.

Dealing with an infected crew member
If you look at the crew icons at the top of the screen someone who's infected will have a yellow star in the top left corner.
Click on the infected crew member and bring up their stats box (bottom left of the screen). Click on 'Conditions' and you'll see that in red it says 'Feeling Ill'. Hovering your mouse over that will bring up a smaller box with a countdown that usually starts at 6 hours, once that gets to zero the crew member can pop at any time and needs to be kept away from the rest of the crew.

If the infected crew member is newly hired from their previous job as an alien wall decoration then the game will usually try to make them get some tools from a tool bench so go to their schedule and set them to immediately have an hour or two of work and hopefully they will go and get some tools (if it's an existing crew member then you can probably skip this bit). That done set their schedule to free time (ie. if the counter is at 4 hours then give them 3 hours of free time) and hopefully they'll get something to eat.
With an hour to go it's isolation time, ideally have a small 2x2 room with just a bed in it. Click on the bed and assign it to the infected crew member then change their schedule so it's time for sleep and they'll go to the room and get into bed. At this point you can click on the door and lock it to stop other crew from wandering in.
I've yet to see anyone pop while sleeping so I give them an hour or twos sleep and then several hours of free time (locked in the room). Sooner or later they'll have a seizure, release a spore cloud then fall unconscious.
Once the cloud has dispersed you can unlock the door and send in another crew member to pick them up and put them back in the bed or better still carry them to a medical bed as they'll recover a bit quicker.

Not sure about the starving to death thing, I've had many infected crew members over several games and none of them have ever starved to death. I can only assume that you weren't feeding them enough and they were close to starvation already. After the spore eruption they can't eat for a day or two anyway so if they were already starving that would likely finish them off.

[Thrim]

I usually just draft the infected person and make them go stand in the corner of the ship somewhere. I don't think they'll pop unless they're standing up so when their timer is low, draft them, send them to their room, and lock the door and air vent.

If they won't eat, I wonder if it's possible to draft them, force them to a medical bed and then maybe someone will come and use an IV on them.