Love the thermals - always enjoyed the gliding in Firefall and also in Aion (which I think had a version of the thermals but not implemented very clearly). Allowing you to stay in the thermal to gain height is awesome (I used to fly gliders so I love those mechanics in games), especially if you can visually tie them in to ground features/terrain (for ideas near ridgelines you could always put in a form of wave lift, the effect of air currents being pushed up by terrain, to use the feature in colder areas/without having to tie it in to volcanic vents/lava lakes if you didn't want to. Whispy 'current' animations or static clouds could be used if you needed a visual cue for players as to their location).
I liked the stall mechanic in Firefall, especially the feel when approaching the threshold (could have been my imagination but I got a sense of the juddering just before the stall and quite enjoyed 'riding' the limits) but can see why you might want to remove it (I still remember a few of my spectacular nose dives into the floor when messing around with the gliding).
Also - loved the glider courses (where you flew through the rings) in Firefall - if time allows I could offer dodgy man-hugs and a series of crap jokes as payment for implementing those in Em8er!
Two goldfish in a tank. One turns to the other and says "How the hell do we drive this?" - I may have just encouraged you to not implement it with that one but what the hell
For the sidestep I prefer the fluid motion for gameplay, even if it looks less realistic, as pauses can lead to frustration when dodging attacks in frenetic combat (I guess the impact for me will depend on how fast your combat pacing gets - the faster the pacing the less popular a pause will be for me personally). It's hard to judge without trying something though - maybe include an option for both in your upcoming demo (without having all the animations etc attached if it saves work) so players can toggle it and see? No clue how feasible that is (or if the value of the feedback would justify the effort) so might be a daft suggestion, apologies if so.
Still enjoying the updates so thanks a lot for keeping us informed!