Or better yet, a "bail out" command, or a "bail out" slider, so that crew leaves a stricken-but-not-quite-dead ship and you avoid losses.
That said, I've never had any trouble maintaining crews that are almost entirely Elite, and the OP's suggestion would just slow it down a bit.
If we want Elites to be rarer, it's not that hard- they need to cost the player enough money on a regular basis that keeping all-Elite crew around for big fleets isn't terribly practical. Then it's a choice- small Elite fleet, or bigger fleets with cheaper Crew?
I don't think anything else is likely to solve the problem; if we just increase Crew death rates, then everybody will split along two lines of optimal play:
1. All-Elite, total emphasis on kiting tactics and not taking any damage.
2. Largely ignore Crew bonuses and stack for DPS and alpha-strike, trading Crew losses for time-efficient attrition; i.e. the "one Frigate at a time" strat.
Which of those routes people will take depends on how much time they're willing to waste to play the game optimally, basically. But making Crew die in large numbers while making them harder to obtain will just push people towards these kinds of strategies and there will be less and less point in the middle strategies of mixed arms tactics that are the most fun to play out.
