I'm probably in the minority but I find the Dread Lord main campaign (I think it's the Dark Avatar campaign, not sure) no fun at all. It's too darn hard and there seems to be no way to turn the difficulty down. For instance I'm on the Apocalypse mission and if I turn down the difficulty all it seems to do is make my AI allies useless, it doesn't seem to affect the dread lords at all.
It's probably just my personal preference but I just don't like playing missions where my ships are totally outclassed at the beginning and it gets harder from then on! At least I would have like to have had a way to turn down the difficulty so I could slowly learn some strats for taking on the dreadlords and then later on when I get better turn up the difficulty.
Just my 2 cents...