Oh, it was available in any trading station I think, for a token sum. At any rate, I generally agree with you; Freespace is definitely a better experience.
The X games have tons of potential, and it's nice to know you're able to buy and fly any ship you see and that you can build a huge economic empire, but they just kinda fail at the overall gaming experience. I'm not sure there's any one big thing that's wrong with the games, but there are countless smaller things. They've also been pretty bad at sound effects and atmosphere; it looks nice, but the rest of it is lacking. Freespace did that part extremely well; when you were in a huge firefight, you could really feel it in the ship. It was pure chaos.
There's also the general lack of content. Kinda strange saying that about the game that probably has the most content of any space sim out there, but it ends up trying to do so much that most of it is either average or poor. They've never focused much on the missions, and it shows. The economy tries to be complex, but ultimately it's a crappy and shallow system that doesn't really add to the game. And when you are rich, there's not much more to do than to jump into random sectors and blow everything to pieces. Which affects nothing but your relationship with that race.
The mods are the reason I fire up the latest game of the series once a year or so, but ultimately I always end up disappointed no matter how many mods I'm running. It's kinda fun'ish at first, starting from scrap and doing random missions to afford your first big ship, but then the fun just vanishes. With no reason to acquire more cash, and your actions having no real or permanent effect on anything, there's not much point in playing except for larping reasons.
That problem isn't exactly unique to the X games, but still. They've been doing them for over a decade now, and they just keep adding more of the same; increasing scale, but not depth. That's why I was initially pleasantly surprised by a fresh start to the series. Though from how I've interpreted things, it doesn't appear to be changing for the better.