Well, in case anyone's interested, here's how things are going:
I'm a bit short on ideas, visually at least, for SHI. I have a few ships that I want to make but am having trouble realizing a good visual language for SHI Industrials -- the current curvilinear form works well for the military and mixed military/civilian roles but not so well for ships that are supposed to do something other than fight. And a few of the things I want to do I have no idea how to make work or (in the case of some of the things currently in game) make work correctly.
This is complicated by the fact that I'm in the middle of a seasonal depression (the onset of winter always seems to sap my creative urges and leave me feeling a bit worthless and blah) and so I've been rather more aggressively sabotaging myself than is usual. No, seriously. I'm pretty much constantly undermining my own efforts to do things, and this gets significantly worse during the winter. Technically speaking, modding Starsector is me sabotaging my efforts to monetize my art (specifically the prerequisite that I have finished art to monetize), and I'm currently sabotaging my efforts to mod Starsector, so that should give you some idea how bad an issue this is for me.
So in short, until/unless I can pull myself away from the trivial distractions with which I am sabotaging myself it'll be a while before SHI starts getting some more love applied to it.