Employee will be prepaid for a month, so you (some players) cannot cheat with firing and rehiring them. New recruits will arrive with a delay and fired employee will leave you forever.
Good, I was going to make a comment on the stiffing your employees by giving them the last day of each month off (or the last few seconds if you're really a jerk).
Delay is also good, I have a habit of teleporting defenders in when a Harvester is bearing down on one of my nearly empty bases. Buying equipment needs a delay on the same grounds. It's one thing to buy up a bunch of ammo when you want it, but you can abuse the lack of delay to teleport any item for 10% of it's price. (If it HAS a price, don't try this with Plasma Ammo yet, you won't get it back)
As for the alien hands thing... I think the biggest argument in favor of the current simple system is that not only are the alien's hands not SO different from humans ones... they are about that different from each other's. Any weapons made for general use (and they all seem to be) would have to be designed with fairly flexible and forgiving holds, triggers and controls.
Of course such a system may still have a role... I want to play the Hovers and Bloodspiders in MP but they were never really intended to be using the same weapons so it's very odd as is. I'm assuming it's just a placeholder now.