Hello to everyone on the forums, this will be my first post here, so please bare with me a bit lol.
No problem, we hope to see a lot more people like you soon.
My original introductions to RTS games was the original Starcraft and Age Of Empires, which I had no problems playing, and I've played quite alot of RTS,Turn based strategy,etc games over the years, but when I finally got Starcraft 2 I came to the horrible conclusion that I suck at using hotkeyes for micromanagement.
Personally I do not use a lot of hotkeys while playing Sins. And those few are only either with ones I didn't realize there was a button for until after I learned the hotkey (scuttling) or very standardized (hold shift to buy more ships etc.). So I doubt that will be a problem, though keep in mind the game does have a bit of a learning curve. Starcraft and age of Empires doesn't teach you how to manage several planets and fleets in real time, but after some practice you can do it without hotkeys.
What drew me to this game in the first place was the speed of the game seemed to be a little more tame than SC2, however there appears to be a hefty amount of micromanagement, which caused me to rethink pre-purchase Rebellion.
The pace of Sins is a lot slower than SC2, especially against the AI. You can easily blow a dozen hours into a single medium sized game if that's the pace you want to play at, especially on not fast settings. Multiplayer tends to play large team games where early contact is quite common and the losing team is expected to quit after a certain point, which can bring down the play time to about an hour, at most two, even with 10 players.
As for the management, Sins has a lot of things going for it that makes it easy to manage a big empire. The biggest I think is that you don't need to babysit your units or else have them get destroyed without even firing. The unit AI is not perfect but its actually capable of fighting basic battles entirely itself (though for tight battles such as on fortified planets you'll want to manage it yourself or take heavy loses), and if you're a laid back type of player you can often just watch the fire works while the battles are going on. At the same time things like the Empire tree make it easy to give orders to places you can even see, and is especially handy for production orders or even moving reinforcements.
In short, you don't have to micromanage a lot to play Sins, but it helps a lot if you do, so if you really want to be good at it you'll need to learn to do it eventually.
But I still want to give it a shot, Am I doomed from the start given my lack of skill at games like SC2? Is it really "Easy to play, difficult to master" as I've heard?
Well, when you're first trying it its a lot to take in, its a complicated game and it does take an adjustment from typical RTS games. But an hour or two after the tutorials you should get the hang of it, and with the basics down, then you enter the difficult to master phase, which most people never quite finish but you'll have a blast trying.