While I do feel like there are things that are too powerful in the game (this probably one of them)
The idea of this stuff is to give people an edge in combat as it was designed to happen, which was, occasional, meaningful combat between players.
So, say you get jumped by a more powerful looking ship try to avoid damage while synthing premium ammo, and hit them harder than they expected.
Against NPC's who cares really. I like having options to crush them.
But PvP wasn't intended to be honourable duels, or even fair.
The idea was you'd run up against in game foes from time to time, and end up in a scrap, over something real. For this, premium makes a lot of sense.
It may be a slightly naive point of view that this is how things would play out in an online game, but it does make sense