It's obviously too late by now anyway, but at least I'll be able to say 'I told you so' before ragequitting .

1) ICE

According to the op the main reason for adding ICE is to give new players an option to get some NIC without 'making this option mandatory' and 'making the game pay to win', but that's exactly what you'll achieve:
Of course it's hard to tell at which price ICEs will settle, but because of the money older players have access to and the amounts they're able to farm I think it's a very conservative estimate to say they will settle around 50m - 100m NIC.
Considering the amounts of NIC new players can get, instead of attracting them,  a good percentage of new players might rather be pissed, because they will feel to be forced to pay additional money to compete with other people; especially new players will have absolutely no chance to keep up with others who sell ICE. And at least for new players this will in fact be some sort of 'pay2win'.

Other negative aspects of ICE are:

- It's an open invitation to use bots and/or exploits.

- The possibility for people to get hundrets of millions of NIC that easily (provided that their real life wallet allows it) might have a very negative impact on the already pretty fragile ingame economy.

While it's clear that it would be very convenient especially to vets to trade some of their NIC for game time, this doesn't really make up for further lowering the rate of trial players who subscribe, hurting the ingame economy and adding an 'indirect item shop'.

I have great respect for you guys that you admit mistakes publicly and try to fix them once you realize it, but it won't be that easy to undo ICE in a future patch if things don't work out as expected again. So it might be worth considering to take a few steps back and think about possible problems before making a permanent change that has a great potential to *** things up.

2) additional EP

I'm glad it's 'just' 20k and not some percentage of the maximum EP or something like that.
Here's the 'but':

Everytime you make contents accessible earlier in the game it will have two downsides:

1. The meaning of existing 'early game content' will be reduced.
2. Possible progress will be reduced.

For example people will be able to use Rivelers at the end of the trial period with those additional 20k.

- This will reduce the usefulness of Termises.

- Once a miner is sitting in a Riveler there's not much to upgrade regarding bots; maybe a mk2 at some time, but that's it.