So, started a couple of new games with The Infernal Machine (...a few other mods updated shortly into my first game so I restarted), and I'm finding it fun - and a bit harder of a start than I'd expected - first game I figured "Oh, sure, I can take on that 90k pirate base bounty with my starting fleet," except it turned out to be a midline station's gun section with a good mix of HE and kinetic, and that did not go well for me.
Initial difficulty scales heavily with random factors, though; on my second game, my starting fleet included a Hammerhead - and that one destroyer was the star of the show for a while, better able to handle early small bounty fleets than the unwieldy TIM itself. Compared to my first run, that was a much more capable starting fleet - I think the first time around I got an SWP Albatross instead of the Hammerhead, and it's just not the same. In retrospect, I should probably have put TIM in storage for a while - that 8k a month in crew cost adds up surprisingly quickly when you don't yet have income from a planet or commission to offset it.
Once you get some upgrades, though, TIM's a proper beast; I've just gotten to upgrading mine with modular fighter bays - currently using interceptors to help with hunting down and finishing off agile frigates.
(I might re-phrase 'removes one random d-mod' in the upgrade options, though. At least from my testing, it seems to remove d-mods in a specific order, always starting with Unreliable Subsystems... as such, I haven't repaired any of TIM's d-mods yet.)
It's also neat to have a solid money-sink that's improving a specific ship rather than the usual colony upgrade business.