I'm not against the heroes dying in some cases, but I think some guarded optimism is ok in this instance. I mean, Hicks could still bite it in this one. I could also see Hicks just being this embittered washout, but one of the few combat-trained marines who survived an encounter with the xenomorphs. Ergo, his experience would be quite valuable. Same reason they brought Ripley on the mission to LV-426 -- they wanted someone with actual experience.
P.S. You REALLY should read Aliens: Book 1 for one possible direction this could go.
The plot issues are kind of retcons themselves, or at least are contrivances that don't jive with what's shown in the previous film which exist solely to write various characters out of the story as expediently as possible. We also see new information introduced that had no relevance or bearing on previous information (e.g. the dog/cow alien looking different from human-spawned aliens -- which can be made to make sense, but hadn't been addressed at all before). To my way of thinking, the biggest "retcon" is the queen having the time and the ability to lay an egg on the landing craft in the first place, when we'd already seen her egg sac detach previously. It's that event which allows anything in Alien3 to actually occur, and it just doesn't make any sense. She's clearly laying eggs using the egg sack on the colony, and it's clearly a slow process. Those eggs are clearly destroyed by Ripley when she first confronts the queen. So...what the hell?
I mean, yeah, you can explain it away. That's what retcons do. The point is, a retcon has to explain it away. It doesn't just obviously follow based on what you were shown. It's also an emotional "cheat" of sorts, which completely undermines the film that came before.
