It seems like there's a dramatic advantage to the Rebels in the Learn to Play scenario:

Every round, I (as the Rebels) can hold one of my ships from acting first, see where you (as the Imperials) move your VSD, then act with my more endangered ship. Next round, I act with the more endangered ship first, potentially squeaking it past the VSD without having to suffer the dangerous front arc blast I was in last turn.

I was thinking about this today, was musing over possible counters to this, and wanted to hear what others thought about this.

I've mentioned it many times elsewhere: don't sweat it too much. The LtP is simply made and set up in order to get people experiencing battle and roll dice and thereby learn the rules. It is not balanced, just take a look at the points each side are bringing to the battle

Sorry, I should have been more general- the scenario I describe is likely to happen in most games if a VSD has one prime target, that target could move first in the next round to avoid the arc if the imperial isn't positioned well. From what I can tell, in that situation you want to give your opponent the choice of two bad options.

Objectives obviously help with this to varying degrees, but having the larger number of ships definitely makes initiative better than it otherwise would be.

If initiative is important/pivotal for your fleet/strategy then you might consider doing a serious bid for initiative. However that will mean that it is one of your opponent's missions you will be playing