Nah,
Having engineered a couple of hundred (yes, really) modules in the last couple of weeks, I've come to the conclusion that everything up to G4 engineering is frivolously trivial for anybody who's dipping into a diverse range of gameplay elements.
You'd have to willfully ignore opportunities to obtain mat's and scans in order to not have everything necessary for G1 to G4 upgrades immediately to hand.
G5, OTOH, does require a bit of effort, and that effort is usually tedious.
Given that G4 mod's currently (as a rule) equate roughly to what people could previously expect from G5 mod's, the current engineering system is mostly plain-sailing.
Unfortunately you ignore one completely different aspect: unlocking the engineers. I mean, i also recently engineered a ship and found it to be not that much hassle any more. But that's because i have all engineers unlocked and the essential blueprints pinned. In contrast, a new player still has to climb the long path of unlocking them all. And some of them really still don't seem to be any fun or quickly done.
I think you make a good point, although personally I would have preferred sidegrades rather than straight upgrades. It is only a problem in freeform PvP though, where there is a strong desire to make a ship as safe as possible at the expense of utility.
Personally, I think the only problem with Engineers is that there's almost never a down-side to a mod' - at least when used knowledgeably.
I also agree with these two statements. Engineers were said to allow us to fine-tune our ships. That sounded a lot like "give here, take there" and get a better ship by shifting things wisely. Instead we got several hundred (!!!) percent more of survivability and a lot of other things stacking up, with no negative aspect to the ship at all. It's merely "grind for power", no more, no less.
At least the lottery and stuff are cut down. Engineers now are much better than they were at launch. In the way that having a cold is better than having tuberculosis. But "better than when they were launched" just means they are "meh!" now, which indeed is a huge step up from being terrible. Unfortunately FD wouldn't dare to smack engineers hard with the nerfbat to bring things in order. Especially not as long as some players are ready to cry loudly at even the thought of balancing being done ever so slightly.