After cooling down from my initial reaction, I'll try to explain why I'm surprised by this changes:
If anything I'd expected quite the opposite! It flatten the differences between ships and weapons slots making choices now more cosmetics rather than tactical.
Most of the weapons changes are "to remove useless mechanics". Well in my opinion they were not useless, just under-exploited.
You say the ammo limitation was not useful in most case, well that is true in the current vanilla balance. But what if suddenly we get to choose between a Hellbore with 50 ammo and less flux, or a Hephaistos with 1000 and highter flux? Suddenly one is the perfect short battle weapon, but quickly become useless in long engagement. There is now an interesting choice to make. In mods we could try even more radical changes that might not be fit for vanilla, like extreme range weapon extremely ammo limited that are only useful to apply pressure on a single ship and have to retreat afterward. To me unlimited ammo could only make sense for PD weapons.
With unlimited ammo, I don't see the point to buy high tech ships except maybe a frigate for player use, because low tech ships cost less, are more sturdy and can't run dry anymore. (yeah I'm over dramatizing but still...)
The beam range makes sense, they clearly needed an edge and a long range is definitively a strong one! (though now, you incentive players to get back to the "kite-for-hours-in-a-frigate" type of gameplay, switching ships when the CR counter run out) But then there is the removal of the flux boost, making them act closer to the ballistic. I agree with the fact that the bonus wasn't obvious enough to make a noticeable difference, but then why not push thing further instead of cutting it down? Like 25% damage at high flux, and 25%+ damage when the shields are not raised? (because of some sort of "energy interference" caused by the shield generator or some technobable) Suddenly, forcing a high-tech ship at high flux to drop it's shield makes it a much more dangerous enemy, even if it takes a beating doing so. It would help high-tech to clear some space before venting when now they are basically screwed if they have to drop shield.
Then there is the missile regen that really don't click for me. Missiles are already much more powerful now, but they get another boost? And one that take the opposite direction as how missile works in the game, in most other games and in reality (not in the "realism" sense, but in the sense you expect them to work). Except for the Pillum, missiles were like a poker game where you could count how many the enemy had left, and act accordingly. But now when you manage to run a Buffalo dry and vent before going in for the kill, suddenly it fire 4 missiles from his sleeve! And it's not cheating! If the goal was mainly to boost the Salamanders, why not make them a MIRV instead? And even better, the sub-missiles could spread and target random weapons in addition to the engines, meaning unless you have a bubble shield you will suffer some hits and get some weapons or engines disabled. If the regen is to stay, maybe consider reactivating the "CR cost per missile fired" in the settings?
And now almost all ships got CR timer. Okay fair enough, that's the new "ammo" mechanic replacement I suppose. But with so few battles lasting more than 5 minutes, I expect it will have exactly the same impact than ballistic ammo before: none except in a few cases. I'm very much in favor to limiting the deployment time, and CR is a great mechanic to do so, but the flat cost+timer implementation don't convince me yet. (why a ship deployed in pursuit a one tanker should loose 25% of CR after shooting only 2 missiles???) Instead, I would rather have all ships loosing CR as soon as they see an enemy, and only have different CR loss speed. That way it would make sense to take some risks to finish a battle more quickly, instead of taking the safe approach because you already "payed" for it the moment you deployed the ships. Deploying an overwhelming fleet would still cost a lot more than just what's necessary, and if needed maybe only add a minimum of 5% CR spent if the ship is deployed?
There are my thoughts, I feel like it's a lot of trimming the differences when I would have loved to see more of them. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though, and will try to test the future update with an open mind.
[PS] Okay I also don't like the changes because the ammo and missile regen was a huge balance factor in half of Scy weapons, now I have to find something else