I'm not sure what this solves? It's the same problem in 12 months when that isn't enough then. Frontier are, whether people (including Frontier) accept it or not, still iterating the design with respect to engagement. At some point a decision was made to diversify modules, so making everything work harder, not smarter. In a game with small, medium and large ships that have very fixed internals.
Ships from 4 years ago sort of don't make sense now. Orca leverages a limited-module-type design that's been repeated in Beluga (and Dolphin) yet that has no correlation with the mechanics added and aren't consistent with additive module bays like the planetary approach suite, or the military modules. No other mechanic has ever had that particular compromise made. So we have two polar-opposite approaches to the concept of a defined module bay.
In short, there is cross-purpose design language and there's actually quite a massive disparity between various mechanics being built. It's not overly consistent. It's like the various teams working on mechanics, just aren't talking to each other.
Frontier have not, even after 4 years, settled on a singular design language and instead tend to piece-meal outcomes. For example; if we consider military slots? these were added to enhance the value. However the locked passenger module bays are the opposite; they take the place of a general module bay. Rather than these being additional, and thus enhancing the ships value as a passenger vessel, they enforce it. These are quite different design goals and clearly were designed, developed and implemented by different people/ teams.
Arguably, Frontier actually re-tooling internals ship-wide, and refactoring the entire fleet to have a manufacturer-consistent approach, with a set of specialised bays (ie that are additive and don't cannibalize existing slots) would probably resolve part of the problem. Frontier also looking at proliferation and reducing duplication of capability across endless modules would also solve much of the issue.
Most all of that can be done without forcing people to just re-engineer everything again.
Really it's simply that the game is 4+ years old, it contains far more module and proliferation than the original design model really considered and this is not going to get any better. The more modules Frontier add, the less people will be able to engage with them, or the resulting mechanics they facilitate.
I honestly don't know just how much of this Frontier thinks about. The design goals around how they expect people to interact with much of anything never really seem to be more than a passing interest.
(and the proliferation of limpet controllers is a bigger issue to outfitting a ship at the mo' IMHO)
