Best of it's abilities? You buy a new ship as a shell, not as a complete package. Let's flip things around towards another real-world situation (the following story is fictional by the way).
I buy a new computer, the case it comes in has all the stuff I want. Plenty of space for HDDs and SSDs, E-ATX compatibility, dual PSU slots, spare PCI backplates for riser cards, plenty of internal capacity for watercooling or even phase change cooling and it looks really snazzy. Unfortunately, despite that potential, it's not a very good computer, the barebones internals supplied with the case are barely enough to class it as a functioning computer, let alone the best possible machine that can fit into the case.
The next step is quite simple, I upgrade the computer to the limits of conventionally available technology. I shop around, visit a few places and eventually stock up on the best hardware that is available at retail. Comes at a pretty price, but it provides a massive increase over the factory original internals that my computer came with. This overall doesn't take too long though, just an evenings work checking a few retailers to get the best I can. As I'm testing the components, I start looking into the diagnostics and the firmware controls, and despite it being the best I could find on the common market, there's probably more that can be done with my new maxed-out hardware; I guess I'll have to send some emails out and make some phone calls to some specialists to see if I can get more out of my hardware.
Working through an entire chain of contacts, I manage to get in touch with a former overclocking champion. He looks at my hardware but sees that I'll need to get some replacement subcomponents for him to work with, those standard capacitors won't do the job properly, plus I'll need to upgrade my cooling systems significantly; to make matters worse, he informs me that he only really works with RAM, to make the most of my computer requires me to speak to specialists for every single type of component.
Fast forward 6 months, where half the components on each of my boards have been replaced with specialist models, including cherry picking them off high-end production lines for optimum performance, I'm in regular contact with both numerous overclocking champions as well as industry specialists (including a few unofficial informers working for the manufacturers who helped me illegally to jailbreak parts of the processors to optimise performance further) to make the most of what I've got. I've travelled the entire world, I've bribed, blackmailed and seduced my way into every relevant technical field, I've had everything in my computer scanned and modified by the greatest machinery and minds the world has to offer; the story behind my quest for making the most behind my computer would make a great novel. My computer has a whole phase change cascade cooling loop, I'm running the computer through a whole bank of UPS systems to provide stable input voltage and the voltages provided to each and every single component are hair-raisingly scary, but I finally have the best version of my computer possible.
Was it worth it? It's higher performance, if not the best possible performance, so it might have been. However, seeking performance so far above and beyond what is normal is a quickfire way to waste a huge amount of time, and should not be for everyone. Sure, I get into the rankings, I beat everyone else on the benchmarks and get crazy framerates even at the highest resolutions known to man,; the question though is about whether it was worth it. Such maddening extremes aren't for everyone, most people are better off just going for the standard off-the-shelf stuff, possibly with a tweak or two to improve performance.
Long story short - if you want performance then you had better be prepared to put the effort in to achieve it. Engineers are not perfect (which is largely why they are changing them to be gradual increases in stats rather than a gambling machine that requires 1000s of materials), but getting into the mindset of "I need to do this in order to have fun" is not a healthy way of thinking about things. Do things as normal, visit engineers when you are in the area or whenever you are getting full of rare materials and then profit over time. Think of them as a period of settling into a new ship, not a 6+ hour grind before using a ship.
