Have we considered allowing folks to adjust the volume of various game elements independently, like a slider for music, a slider for ambient effects, a slider for voices?

Yes.

We've actually been paying a lot of attention to various other games on the market that have much more complex audio options than we do, and we really want to improve that and make it a much more customisable experience.

I think I'd always be a bit reluctant personally to give an ambient slider that's separate to Foley and stuff, because it could give you a gameplay advantage if you can just turn down all of the ambient sound and hear all of the Foley and the footsteps and gunshots and stuff loud and clear. It's more up to us to just keep on making the mix better so people don't feel like they need to have that.

And one idea we've floated is creating mix profiles based on context in the game. So say if you're in a multi-crew ship, a pilot would necessarily need to hear different things to what a turret gunner would need to listen to. The information input they need is different, same as an engineer. So in the future, there may be a possibility to create context-specific mixes where, in this context, you hear X, Y and Z, but in this other context, you hear A, B, C. And then maybe we can make them selectable, or maybe a custom context mix snapshot. We want to give the players as much flexibility as possible, but obviously we want to make sure that we're not skewing gameplay one way or another.