Modules are more or less the same situation as weapons. They depend on fleet strategy, though they can be considered more akin to different ship hulls. Again, no risk of being "one strategy to rule them all" unless your modules are simply horribly balanced.
I am curious as to how you arrived at that conclusion. I have to say I disagree. Sure, because this is a single player game as long as nothing is crazily imbalanced a lot will come down to subjective opinions, but that doesn't mean there won't be optimal builds.
Optimal builds exist right now in ships (your example of how that wouldn't happen with stations?) Even though builds are ship to ship there are some common weapons in most of those builds and funnily enough most of the things that make those builds unique are player limiting factors. Energy weapons rather than ballistic force some weapon choices. OP requirements force weapon downgrades and make choices more meaningful. There are dozens of examples, honestly, and most of it comes down to limiting the player in some way.
Defensive gameplay is generally pretty boring. Doing it once in a while can be a fun bit of variety, but it is rightly not the focus of the game.
Right, we are on the same page here. I was saying because autoresolve is handling everything it should treat stations differently specifically because being overly defensive would be boring. Your comment was that loadouts don't matter and I was saying well then that's a shame.
Limiting player choice because "balance" is never good, especially in a single-player game. Furthermore, replacing that choice with RNG (because weapons are randomly assigned) doesn't even improve the balance in the first place.
Well RNG is an assumption. Again, my mod has no RNG with stations. Weapons are set when you build the industry and instead of 3 station types there are around 8 or 9. Modules are also more varied and contain more fighters, ship systems like fortress shield, etc. And as Alex has already stated you can mostly control what weapons your stations equip in Vanilla as well.
As far as limiting player choice for balance's sake being a "bad thing", I strongly disagree there.
The vast majority (if not literally all) games do this... Don't get me wrong, I like deck building as much as the next strategist, but limiting player choice to streamline the player experience through balanced systems is actually very important.
The obvious examples of course are online strategy games, but all single player games also limit the player in at least some way for the sake of a balanced experience. The ones that don't do this well enough end up feeling half-baked, boring and exploitable with gimmick mechanics, or have unforgivable difficulty spikes that break of the continuity of the game's progression.
To give a VERY old example of how that can happen: (For brevity, I am very much over-simplifying this, so keep that in mind)
Sonic the Hedgehog in its 2D form was all about being able to go really fast. You dodged enemies and there were traps and things that would stop you or slow you down- but the more skilled you were the faster you could go, generally, and it felt satisfying.
When Sonic went 3D, the developers tried to go for the same feeling that was invoked by the first game but removed many of the obstacles thinking that players really just wanted to go fast. It was criticized as a theme-park game with no real substance because you could in some areas duck tape your controller stick to the "go forward" position and the level would be beaten for you. It actually didn't matter to players that they were allowed to go really fast because there was nothing limiting them in the first place that made the feeling of going fast meaningful. It wasn't because they were good at the game it was because they had thumbs.