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I think you might need to be careful with the random elements, and with the subjective feeling that players get in the game. It's important for bravery to feel like it matters. A lesson from X1 - it shipped with psionics not working as intended, that is, bravery was mostly meaningless and psionics were resolved with a random roll, only marginally affected by bravery. Many players complained about psionics feeling wrong but that bug went undiscovered for a few years, and resulted in the game just feeling subtly wrong in that regard.

Yeah, Mind Shields currently don't provide any bonus against alien psionics - but that'll be fixed in the next few patches. Perhaps the alien psions are too strong at the moment, but it's not true that there's no defence against Mind War - it's a check versus the unit's Bravery vs. the alien Psionic Strength, with a random element added on. And the aliens have to succeed by more than 30 to Mind Control a unit rather than just panic it. Units also get a bonus to their Bravery equal to the % of TU that they have remaining, though, so if a unit has full TU at the end of your turn they have double bravery and have a much better chance of resisting it. And you should be taking low Bravery soldiers into battle against Psyons anyway, really. I appreciate none of that is explained in the game atm though so I can definitely see how Mind War is frustrating to play against; see if you find it any less frustrating now you know that. Potentially there's an argument to make the random element smaller as part of a balancing pass, but that also means low Bravery soldiers will have less chance to resist a psionic attack.

Wow, glad to hear you enjoyed Xenonauts 1 so much that you spent 1000 hours on it! Generally the reason why dev teams don't introduce two separate mechanics for the same thing is that it's difficult to balance the game for both mechanics - for example, the personnel capacity of a Living Quarters would probably be different if you were limited to a single base (so could only have a few Living Quarters) compared to if you could build multiple bases (so you could build as many Living Quarters as you like). So you then need to maintain and balance two different versions of the game, which ends up being twice as much work. The other problem is that one mechanic tends to be the "proper" way to play, and the other mechanic ends up being abused or breaks the game - for instance, I understand the realtime combat in X-Com Apocalypse is pretty abusable and makes difficult missions much easier. At that point you may as well just not include realtime and concentrate on making the turn-based mode even better.