What a hair-brained, grindy, and utterly unenjoyable gameplay loop this is going to be.
And it will stay like that too if people continue to choose to participate in it rather than complain and provide feedback, and it takes a lot of it too. Ship engineering eventually improved after years or complaining and feedback. It's still not great, but then look at powerplay, it's still trash.
So, if we want to see how 4 mods on a g5 weapon synergize... We need to commit all those materials, and if we don't like, or find one or two mods unnecessary...we simply can't replace them.
And you need to build another g5 weapon from scratch.
That's idiotic.
Right there with you. And the saddest thing? It's completely regressive. Ship engineering was
changed because of how much it sucked... And what do they do? Re-implement it the way it was before all the engineering improvements. And again, those changes only came after years of piled on complaints... So dont let up on them if you want to see something better of it.
The thing that irks me the most is that you cant hot swap the upgrades. At the very least for weapons they should be interchangable where applicable. For ships and hardware, I can understand the philosophy that the mods are baked in. They're actually 'tuning' the thing to behave differently, and potentially quite literally bolting things on and making core internal changes and modifications. But some of the upgrades for weapons are as silly as an extended mag or putting on a scope! Imagine if you went to the gun shop, bought a sight and they welded it onto the rail! In fact, why do you have to dump egregious amounts of resources into the gun itself just to be able to make simple additions?
Sad thing is that they could probably retroactively and non-destructively fix that aspect, but I dont think they ever will given their track record.