By and large, the people with the most engineering experience and those supplying numbers seem to agree this is going to be worse, while those who have never bothered with engineering much seem to be the most vocal supporters of the proposed changes.
I take your point, the people most invested in the current system are those that have spent hours searching for those G5 components and then rolling alot of times to get a "good" result. the new system is showing that for n rolls per level you can guarantee that you can max out the benefit. So forgetting number of mats needed, you can guarantee a maxed out G5 result if you do 6 x G1's, 6 xG2's etc, up to 6 x G5's, rather than having to do 100 G5 rolls and still not max out your result.
I engineer for PvE so I don't worry about getting the maximum result, just good enough to dominate NPC's, the attraction from me is that I can get a maxxed G5 result if I do it enough and it wouldnt be 100's of rolls.
I also saw a stream where Kofyeh was searching for Core Dynamics, she found some, but only after 6 hours of searching (I didn't watch the 6 hours, just the 15 mins when she found them), for me the material broker gives me a way to circumvent the mindless searching grind to something more productive, farming G1 or G3 mats/data where you know that getting 100 of these will result in x number of G5 equivalent components is more productive gameplay.
From a material point of view I enjoy hooning around in an SRV, now I know that I dont have to ignore Mesosiderites or outcrops as whatever they drop will be of potential use. Heck with the ignore function now in mining I can go and blat a ring or two and get useful stuffs. The data side I am more unsure of, but the benefit of the broker showing what converts to what means I can concentrate on specifics to get the right bits to convert.
I can see why they want to slow down progression in the engineers, along the lines of that that the tinkering in Grade 1 is built on by the Grade 2 tinkering etc. so players wiklol have grade 3 MC's , grade 2 shields, grade 5 FSD etc and slowly improve their ship to the max.
The major part of this frustration is that players who have everything now, will have to go back to scratch and build up capabilities on each modification - ie. you ahd everything now and the new system takes that away from you. just remember that all players will be in the same boat, so no-one will have an edge.
I would prefer that all exiting modules were not grandfathered but converted to max level in the new system and given a free conversion to a specific experimental affect, so no "edge" cases would exist to make people hanker after the old way. But that is probably pouring petrol on hot ashes! ;-)
We will find out how "terrible" it is on Thursday, and I am sure the mnods will be busy closing duplicate threads about engineer grind that evening! ;-)