I stated elsewhere, that I think it unfair. I am not affected directly, since while I have the 5000 ly long since, I still need to learn about Palin, so it does not affect my plans (yet).
On the other hand it is a slap into the face of newer players, who do not yet have unlocked Palin. I read here from at least one player who just does the 5000 ly journey, for nothing now. It just affects the players, who will not and cannot (yet?) fight Thargoids, because of not having an G5 OP super ships with special weapons. The player group who already has Palin has pinned the upgrade anyway and laughs at the other group, they tell us how we do not need Palin anyway, how to 'git gud' and things like that.
It is a really smart move on FDevs side, the usual 'quality', and a true QoL 'improvement' for newer players. We just learned, that every engineer can just disappear. The hassle to unlock an engineer might be useless. If they wanted to do something really consequential they would have disabled Palins upgrades also for all pinned upgrades, so that everybody is affected, not only newer players. While this would have spared us the condescending comments, it also would have caused a loud howling - and FDev did not have the balls to do that.
So we not only are grinding hard to catch up, and maybe fight Thargoids later, we now have disappearing engineers and a totally skewed, broken and stealth nerfed material gathering to fight. No time for CGs or Thargoid combat, and not the means. And the condescending comments from some 'community' members (who all have the upgrade pinned) do not really help too...