omg empire tree jumping is SO ANNOYING.

And has been complained about since the beta of the original Sins, if i recall. So, i'm not exactly holding my breath here

I think what they are referring to is how while ships are arriving at or leaving a battle it is difficult to issue orders targeting ships in the empire tree as the influx of ships entering/leaving causes the ship they are trying to target to jump up or down in the empire tree relative to the screen.

Unfortunately though, while annoying as all hell, there isn't much of a practical solution for it if you want the empire tree to organize ships by ship type in the empire tree(which we do).  Well for new ships entering anyway. 

One problem is that it has an absolute point-of-reference.

So, when there are ships jumping, an extra group is created, offsetting everything downwards. When the group arrives, everything shifts upwards, and sometimes downwards agains when ships are (re)grouped inside the arrival planet.

If the point-of-reference were to be made relative to the player's view, specifically the planet vertical span where the mouse lies in, it would stop bobbing up and down and let the player point and click where (s)he|it wants to.

It could also be a circular list instead of a pillar with top and bottom. Then going after the last planet would show the first again.

Yes. freezing the line where the mouse is, and adding and subtracting new lines in such a way that the line the mouse is over does not move would be the best option.

The only thing I can think is; there must be something so challenging to it, that it would break the game if they fixed it.  Either that, or they just don't have the resources to devote it, otherwise, such a glaring defect to the game interface would have been remedied long ago.

Oh you can whine about this and you'll get the good ole' response of: "I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF ALL THE MONEY IM MAKING!" This is just one of the more annoying pimples that have inhabited the backside of sins for ages, but never was so much as a concern given to it.  Notice how there is still no option to disable auto-pinning of star bases, or is there? I have not bought Rebellion.

I would give you my copy if I could sometimes, empire tree truly makes the game unplayable at times for me. 

I love what the devs have accomplished with SINS, ok 99.994321% of it, but, this is the most needless shot in the foot to an otherwise "stellar" game.

I can't imagine that people prefer to zoom into individual ships to target units in a grav well instead of using the empire tree; Idk, but I guess there is some secret to mitigating the jumping tree that everyone else is up on.

Just once, I mean once in the nearly 3 years of inquiries, it would be nice to have some kind of acknowledgement that this is a problem, or oversight, or whatever, but just some kind of response from the devs would be nice.  My fear is they know they can't reasonably defend it by saying "it's not that bad" or justifying it in some way,but maybe because the fix is worse than the problem.

Like I say, hard to imagine why this hasn't been addressed in all this time.

You know?

I've never once used the empire tree and i've been playing Sins since 2007-2008 (whenever the first one was released). So maybe the secret is that people don't use it as much as you'd think, or they have just learned to live with it. Or maybe they just gave up on asking for a fix.

WORK AROUND!

Go to Options, Video, enable window mode.  When prompted to keep, select cancel.  When you play game, cursor will stay in game monitor!

I really wished there was a way to turn it off completely, I rarely use it.