Have you flown the Civ...?
Yes.
For a while it was one of the best ships to harvest and transport corrosive cargo. Today it's one of the best local mission runners in systems with long SC distances because it can hold tons of fuel and armor for a small ship (which are faster in SCO)...I don't even have to bother capping my frame rate to 24 (which is profoundly annoying) to get around with it. It's never been one of my CMDR's goto ships, it's flatly bad in a lot of ways, but it has enough unique features to give it a niche that cannot be precisely duplicated.
Personally, I am still at a loss as to what makes a pre-built ship a microtransaction. I would love to be enlightened. Cosmetics sure but, a pre built ship is another story.
Any expenditure of real-world money on a game, beyond that required for basic access to the game (subscription fees or expansions), is a microtransaction. One could argue that a one-off expenditure like a ship unlock is more akin to an expansion, but if it becomes the norm to acquire such access piecemeal, I'd consider those microtransactions. A repeatable purchase like a pre-built ship is every bit as much a microtransaction as cosmetics, if not more so. Cosmetics after all, are infinitely reusable and can be duplicated (put on more than one suit/vehicle) without needing to be bought again. A pre-built ship is a discrete asset that must be purchased again to have another copy of it.
Anybody who has a Cobra MKIV is already participating in pay to win more than anyone paying for the early accesss is. At least we will all eventually have access to the Python MkII...
My first indulgence with pay-to-win in this game was called Tactical Graphite.
Ships - Stealth Clipper Setup
Done some testing with the 1.2 NPC's. was 7km out, into SR mode in Python. Boost + FA off and the enemy turns directly towards me at 4km away and moves in for a scan. I was moving too fast to stop, collision, dead enemy and I have 100,000 in repair costs. Praise be to the hull reinforcement...
Having a blast in Bast!
Despite some instancing hiccups and latency, I'm actually having a fair bit of fun. Of course, my wingman is wanted in the system, so that probably contributes. Been futzing around in a stealth Clipper... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHfCAK4Rg5A Sooner or later someone will make a "nerf...
Those videos are all gone as I deleted the account they were associated with years ago, but for an example of how it can be difficult to distinguish dark colored ships that were capable of silent running for the full duration of an engagement, this should suffice:
That's with just two opponents. Fighting five or six ships that all looked identical, all blended in to the background, that couldn't be targeted could be frustrating.
Anyway, I've spent more on cosmetics than most people have spent on the game and the only reason I ever bought cosmetics before Arx was for a tangible gameplay advantage (camouflage). This is something I've repeatedly complained about in the past (I recall suggesting that every ship be given a free low visibility paint job precisely because cosmetics shouldn't be so P2W) and that Frontier seemed to have grudgingly acknowledge as they started giving away Midnight Black paint jobs that year (2015). 2.0's global changes to heat, 2.1's introduction of Engineering (and emissive), then the later addition of night vision rendered it almost totally moot, but for a good year paint was overtly P2W.
As for the apparent hypocrisy here, I play the game I have, even if the game I have isn't exactly what I want. I've been complaining about Engineering since the 2.1 beta, and would remove all traces of it from the game if I had the power, but my CMDR still has 5k+ G5 rolls, because, despite me wishing it otherwise, Engineering exists and matters.