The problem is that skill is hard to quantify in a game where you can savescum. Let's assume the player is not a masochist and likes to win his engagements. Let's also assume that he can take the occasional friendly ship blowing up since in this version money comes easily and redoing fights is tedious.
This mod unfortunately has the side effect of long-lasting negatives applying to ship losses. It makes savescumming more attractive again. Whether people do that or not, well.. up to them.
On default settings it's probably a toss-up. I had a big fleet and fought a small skirmish with just a few frigates. Afterwards there were a bunch of negatives handed out for reserved ships. This turned me off of a few settings which I changed. If I had not changed them, I think positives and negatives would end up being heavily tilted towards random. The mod incentivizes having all ships be combat-able, and using all ships in your fleet for fear of reserves being struck by bad RNG.
If it was up to me, I'd make these settings the default:
Trait chance multiplier for all reserved ships: 0
Bonus chance randomness: Heavily reduced from 0.5 to maybe 0.1-0.2
I would also reduce the magnitude of all traits on all levels to about half of what it is now. The outliers currently are either very strong buffs or very strong nerfs, neither of which I think are desirable for a system that is largely based on reputation & psychology. If fights are too easy, you get bored. If your fleet is screwed, you don't need to get screwed harder.