I keep seeing the sentiment that "engineering should be gradual" being thrown around, and while I completely agree with it -- I'd love to have engineering be a journey both you and your ship embark on together during the course of normal play -- the way it's currently implemented doesn't lend itself to gradual upgrades at all. I'm a relatively casual player. I have a good deal of time to play, but I'm not too bothered about trying to min/max (2-3 rolls per module is fine) or waiting a few weeks or months to get something I want. From that perspective, I see four main reasons why engineering wasn't a gradual process for me, and why the first ship I bothered to engineer at all (outside of FSD range increases) was my "end-game" ship, the Anaconda:
The engineer unlock requirements.
By demanding a large investment of time upfront before you can even start to engineer your ships, you encourage players to similarly front-load their materials gathering process. For example: if I'm already going to be spending 3-4 hours doing something I don't really enjoy (mining) to unlock Ms. Selene Jean, even if done piecemeal (50T here and there between missions) as I did, what does an extra hour or so spent gathering materials matter? Just G5 and be done with it. For me, grades 1-4 only ever seemed like filler. They saw use on my ship, sure, but only temporarily, and only as "accidents" of the process of unlocking grade 5 access for something else. The new beta approach won't magically make grades 1-4 useful in this sense; it'll just make the filler even fill-ier. Why not grant immediate access to grade 1 once you learn of an engineer and let number of tons mined or light-years traveled or Kamitra cigars delivered or what-not progressively unlock the higher ranks instead of simply the number of rolls made per grade? At least then I can go grab an armor or HRP upgrade for my new Eagle or Viper right-away without mining a single ton, even if it's only G1 for now. Once I get a bigger ship that's capable of mining more than one or two tons at a time, I can come back and grab a G2 or G3. Then, when I get my really big ship that can fit all those collector limpets and prospector limpets and mining lasers, then I can go back for the G5. See: gradual. (At the very least, for the love of god, make the rare cargo requirements multiples of the max you can carry. Nothing's worse that having to make that last trip for a measly 2 tons of cigars, especially if you have a cargo hold that could fit 128!).
Engineers are too few and are spread too far out around the galaxy.
As it stands, engineering isn't a "well, if I'm going to be in the area anyway" kind of event. It's a conscious decision: "I'm going to do some engineering today." It's something you dedicate a chunk of time to. Again, since they're going out of their way to engineer, deviating from what they would otherwise be doing, you encourage players to front-load the materials gathering process. Think of it this way: if the nearest grocery store is an hour's drive away, are you going to drive all the way out there everyday to pick up supplies for just the next day? No! You'll go maybe once a week, and you'll pick up enough for the entire week. That's engineering as implemented. Being able to remote engineer may help, but if it's only ever a single grade at a time that can be pinned, and especially if remote engineering doesn't count towards unlocking the next grade (haven't played the beta, so this is all hearsay on my part), then what's the point? You'll either quickly find yourself having to head back to pin the next grade, or worse, you'll be wasting materials. I suppose one solution would be to "remote engineer all the things!" but why bother having engineers or engineer bases at all? Instead, create more engineers! You can't tell me that in a galaxy with trillions of people, that only one or two are capable of performing these upgrades. Put them in hubs: a couple Alliance hubs, a couple Imperial hubs, a couple Federal hubs, an independent hub, a Colonia hub, a Pleiades hub, you name it! Give each hub a focus, but make sure there's enough blueprint variety in each to cover all the roles. Perhaps for any particular module, every hub has someone who can do grades 1-3, half of the hubs have someone who can do grade 4, and only one or two has someone capable of top-of-the-line grade 5 mods. Back to the grocery store analogy, now you have several grocery stores to choose from. The one with the absolute best produce may be several kilometers away, but the one down the street's is good enough, and they've got the best bread. That's what I'd like to see engineering become: a bunch of nearby engineers you can visit whenever the mood strikes you and where you can get anything you want upgraded, but not always to its highest potential; for that, you'll have to travel.
You throw away progress when moving up the ship tiers.
This is why I never really bothered to engineer anything other than FSD range increases until I had my Anaconda. Each time I moved up to another ship tier, I was able to recover most of the credits I'd spent on the previous ship's hull in order to help fund the next. I was also able to sell off my lower class modules to pay for the new, higher class ones. If I had engineered a bunch of them, I'd be effectively throwing away materials and the time spent gathering those materials by selling them. This gets worse in the new system: not only am I throwing away the 2-3 rolls I made at the grade I wanted, I'm also throwing away all the previous rolls needed to get the module to that grade in the first place. In many cases you can re-use the lower class modules such as power plants and distributors, but that's not always possible or desirable or effective. I suppose it depends on your play style how much this effects you. If you like to collect ships and don't sell the old ones, then it's probably not a big deal. I tend to stick to a single ship at a time, though. Now that I'm flush with credits, I've been buying up some of my old ones, but I don't really fly them much. I think I'd have been much more willing to engineer earlier on if I could transfer over my progress somehow to the higher class, even if at a cost (grade X turns into grade X-1 for example).
