I think this is a design decision to have all of the largest ships be the best in class for any given purpose, and I view that as pandering to collectors and grinders rather people that simply want to enjoy the game in the ship they enjoy flying without having to compromise just because they don't like big ships.
I, too, suspect the Anaconda was designed from the beginning as a sort of "ultimate ship", however regarding jump range one also has to consider that it is the only thing where the game strictly adheres to its own rules of "physics". Basically, they couldn't give a fully equipped and loaded Anaconda a decent jump range without also making it the best jump range when equipped very light-weight.
This is why I am so excited about Engineers. Rather than relying on compromises to gain variation. This gives Frontier the choice to shift the effort from a money grind to a materials grind, which means maybe we can smaller and medium ships matching the bigger ships in certain areas that have apparently have nothing to do with size or monetary cost.
I find it a bit puzzling you come to that conclusion. You are leaping there from "material grind" to "smaller ships can now match bigger ships in specialized areas".
First of all, the type of grind is completely irrelevant. Whether it is materials we hand over to an engineer or credits, or whether an engineer is involved at all or just a regular outfitting service - you exchange currency for components and stats. And anyway, as always with these things, both materials and credits boil down to time as the actual currency. It matters not how many materials or credits it takes, it matters how much time it takes to earn the price of an item.
(And I must say a credit grind is the superior one because credits are universal and agnostic to the activity - lots of things earn you credits. This is one point I so hate about most MMOs - having so many specialized currencies to collect, all with their unique and narrow method of acquisition. You don't choose what you want to do, you have to choose what item you want to get, then the decision is already made for you what and how you have to play.)
Second, it is unknown to us what type of modification engineers will provide:
a) Upgrades with competing and bigger downsides; e.g. 5% more laser damage but overheats 10% faster, 5% more speed but 10% less agility. I hope this is the case, it makes for the most meaningful decisions and avoids a clear cookie cutter path of mandatory no-brainer upgrade for any ship.
b) Upgrades with non-competing downsides. 5% more laser damage but the gun weighs 1 ton more, 5% more speed but the drives consume 1MW more power. Depending on the ship and loadout, such downsides easily become irrelevant and the whole thing devolves into just a set of different cookie cutter choices for each ship.
c) Upgrades with competing but smaller downsides. 10% more laser damage but 5% more heat. The downside is basically irrelevant because for the result of the modification is still better, it gains in burst dps, sustained dps,
and efficiency all at the same time.
d) Just upgrades. Grind rep, hand in materials, select buff, rinse repeat. The only choice is which buff you want (if there are multiple buffs to choose from for the same item but you can only have one - which is also a detail we don't know yet).
In cases c) and d), mods are not a matter of whether, but just
which one, and engineers are reduced to an extremely convoluted method of introducing A+ gear rating.
Plus, if the past has shown us anything, then it is that bigger ships have usually much more "wiggle room". It is much easier to free up a MW of power on a Corvette than it is on a Viper, and above a certain point mass becomes a dump stat that you care only about when you want to improve your jump range (e.g. selling armour for travelling, then buying new armour at the destination; which is btw imho a silly thing for the game to enable like that).
Thus, I don't see how you conclude from the prospect of 2.1 that the smaller ships would be able to gain anything that the bigger ships would not gain in equal
if not higher measure.
(However with DW Teamwork Superpower.
