This is what makes me think they somehow screwed up in where they placed the 0,0,0 point on ships.
I assume that NPCs are coded to aim at a certain point, not at the ship itself. Then, that's further modified by their skill rating, so higher ranking NPCs don't actually have better aim, they just only are allowed to fire when their aim is on target, while lower ranking NPCs have more leeway in when they fire.
That's why elite NPCs seem to have become useless; because when they rebuilt the ship models for Odyssey, they accidentally misplaced that target point, apparently somewhere OUTSIDE the ship model in most cases. Meanwhile, lower-ranked NPCs can fire far more freely, THINKING they are going to miss, but incidentally hitting at least some of the time. That's also why thargoids flat-out won't fire at small ships at all; they aren't allowed to fire if they're going to miss, and they always think they're going to miss because the target point is completely outside the model!
This also leads to some really weird things with stuff like the gunner seat in multicrew, where sometimes you can 'lose connection' (like you're trying to look through a solid object) even when you're out in empty space.
Unfortunately, I suspect this problem is very difficult to fix, as it likely requires going through every single ship and fixing them one at a time, and who knows what other bugs might spring up as a result.
This is all hypothetical, of course, but it would explain a lot.
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