Fun is subjective. I certainly think randomized abstractions can be more fun than the alternative of purely formulaic results, especially when the detail needed to do justice to them is impractical to implement.
Almost no mainstream FPS games feature weapon malfunctions/gun jamming because it's not fun and gets in the way of the action. Taking away movement controls is a more harsh version of that.
Even the most mainstream FPS games have things like random/pseudo random projectile spread, and one doesn't have to go very deep into niche shooters to encounter jamming mechanisms or the like. I consider these effects part of the action, not an obstacle to it.
Elite does have weapon malfunctions/jamming, but only as a result of damage and I think that's the main reason seekers are banned in competitive PvP - they do massive module/hardpoint damage (with little skill required) and it ends up in a situation where the other player is still alive but can't shoot back and that's no fun.
Anything that causes module damage below 80% integrity has a chance of triggering malfunctions and most weapons are capable of damaging modules. And damage isn't the only way to induce malfunctions (there are special weapons and effects that can do this). Only the near omnipresence of strong shields makes it a minor issue, seekers or not.
Back when stealth and hybrid vessels were more viable and shields less of an absolute protection, it was expected that one know how to rotate one's critical externals away from sources of splash damage and know the internal layout of as many ships as possible in order to better protect one's internal modules while taking advantage of the openings presented by foes. Such considerations were also meaningful balancing factors between various ships...for example it's one of the reasons the FAS was/is worse than it looks on paper--it's distributor is exposed, it's cockpit is near the center of the nose, and you can't point any PDTs it may have at incoming munitions without exposing all of it's weapons to splash damage. Ultimately, if one wound up in a situation where they couldn't maneuver or shoot, they either screwed up (by not knowing their ship), or were simply overwhelmed. Things changed a bit as hull integrity outstripped module integrity and effective shield strength utterly dwarfed either.
Letting players build a ship that randomly breaks by default is bade design and while experienced players might be able to and might want to deal with it, for new players it'd be a worse trap choice than any of the currently existing choices that are just worse than the better choices but usually not worse than stock (stuff like lightweight hull reinforcements being the exception).
I can picture the conversation:
New Player: "What do you mean I spent 50 hours engineering my ship and now I died because it's worse because stuff randomly breaks"
Veteran: "lol nice self-own, noob"
Plenty of ignorant players have fully Engineered their stock E-rated modules without realizing that the base module matters; even more fail to properly budget power or manage power priorities; and back before they globally nerfed module damage from heat (as a bad fix for a bug that caused such damage to be multiplied by the number of CMDRs in an instance) a whole lot of CMDRs were melting their ships in combat. There are also countless bad Engineering modifications that are ultimately a waste of materials, yet are presented as viable upgrades.
Even before Engineering, players have always been able to build lemons. It's just a bit costlier now. Being able to make even more useless modules is not much of a downside, because the bad ones are getting sold back to the station anyway. I think my CMDR has fewer than one-in-five of the modules he's ever Engineered...the rest were depreciated by evolving game mechanisms or demographic shifts in the 'meta', or were purely educational experiments.
Anyway, ignorant players falling into traps is an argument for better documentation and better players, not purely inflationary options, IMO.
And what is new player friendly?
An accurate, up to date, 600-page paper manual and a copy of 'Hooked on Phonics' so public education victims have a shot at translating it.
I prefer a situation where every ship destruction is because I did something wrong, and I can learn from it. I find that I more-or-less have this in ED.
I'm confident this situation would remain even with a lot more risk and uncertainty, because of the caution they would prompt. The game currently incentivises a degree of recklessness I find rather incredible--in the worst and most literal sense of the term.
It is interesting the ED does not impose actual ingame roadblocks to players.
ED has a few. Some are technical, but others are quite deliberate. Among the deliberate ones permit locks and exclusion zones are prime examples.
Anyway, any hard roadblocks are out of place in most simulations (even if it's not reality that's being simulated) or any setting that values verisimilitude. Personally, I don't even like them in my traditional RPGs. Almost invariably I prefer organic constraints that can potentially be bypassed though gameplay. I make an exception for trading assets between players in persistent multiplayer games with poor supply constraints, as absurd as such limits are from an internal verisimilitude perspective.
