Frontier are quite conservative (to be fair, the toxicity around the game several years ago was appalling so I am not surprised they are times a little timid) and so for them, a few thousand tons is a headache from a gameplay and systems perspective; for us, sometimes that's just Tuesday.
Frontier has some interesting design limits to work around; if one thinks about it a bit.
- they could have designed PC with say 4x size 8 cargo modules, 3 size 7. This would be trivial to make strong enough that it would be virtually impervious to any form of damage, including station guns, I don't even mean with heals-for-feels, so that makes policing difficult.
- Then there's the mass. Class 8, A rated thrusters, have a max mass of 5040 tons, so a ship that might be 2300t hull and module mass, leaves ~3k ton cargo. However it's not that simple, as any gravitational mass (eg planet) over 1g, would prevent the ship landing. This just creates more of the existing situation where some ships can fit thrusters so small, they aren't technically able to land on higher g planets, and Frontier has to do some widgery-pokery in the engine to override that situation. It would or could get to the point the ship basically can't take off because it's mass exceeds the ability for the thrusters to move it, haha.
- Large ship might require larger modules; they don't go above class 8 so Frontier would have to add an entire new tier of modules, which they've never done (anything new has always been in an existing tier). Size 9A thrusters would go for over 300 million and have a mass exceeding 320 tons!
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This is why I was hopeful that PC would hit around 1500t or so (we've seen that number a lot, as I think it represents a sort of agreed level of 'good'); it would have worked out fine, well within module capability and probably reduced a lot of this talk about an even bigger ship (which exists because of expectation not being met by the developer; expectation they kinda leant in on). I genuinely believe this is about as big as Frontier will want to go, before, effectively, needing to go to carrier class options or be faced with very real engine limitations that require poking at code they almost certainly don't want to go near.
People might be all about big physically, but that really is just a justification for "more cargo". If the PC had offered a bit more cargo, there would still be the same calls (always is) but I think from much fewer people.
I think expecting something 'even bigger' now is probably cope. Never say never, but I suspect the odds of a larger PC is basically fast approaching zero. Frontier has to make (dramatic) changes to code to do so.
