I respectfully disagree with many of posters here.
This is clearly a mod which at least some players will legitimately want to use. It perhaps warrants some sort of incompatibility warning, but whether it can exist and advertise itself for use should not be in question.
Mods for singleplayer games are opt-in; each player is responsible for managing how they want to play their own game, and even "ruin" their experience from your subjective perspective if they choose to, provided they don't try to blame everyone else. It is nice of mod authors to build in support for everyone else's mods and especially cool if it leads to proper tie-ins, but it is hard to argue that it even approaches an "obligation" for them to support inter-mod compatibility, much less wide-ranging compatibility that addresses edge cases in other mods which themselves work because of specific assumptions made about vanilla. Every single other modding community (Total War, for example, to cite a case where mod conflicts are a serious problem) simply deals with this by acknowledging that conflicts can cause bug reports in the wrong places, makes the first step of debugging is "what's your mod list" or perhaps "do you have one of these known high-conflict-risk mods installed", and making it perfectly acceptable for each individual author to say "that problem is caused by another mod, and I'm not willing or able to devote time to it at the moment". Starsector's modding structure is super-easy and innately low-conflict by comparison but I don't think that is good reason to turn about and paint wide-ranging compatibility as an "obligation" for other mod authors. Of course it would be another matter if that mod author was maliciously creating incompatibilities and stirring the pot, but there's nothing to warrant accusing Straticus of that. To turn the question around, why should new mod authors be "obliged" to write in special-case support for older ones, provided that they are not applicable to all players (e.g. graphical enhancements) but only cater to players that want a specific gameplay experience?
The thought had occurred to me to resist making this change
This would have been a perfectly supportable position, but I think where you're going is a nice direction too.
It's a nice idea for a mod that I'm sure lots of players will like, but it's undoubtedly going to be a huge headache for mod makers.
Other mod makers are under no obligation to provide tech support for this mod or anyone using this mod, and this mod is not forcing itself into anyone's game directory without player intervention. Individual players can trivially make their own edits and break mods, and what this mod does is not a difference of kind if it does not claim that it is highly compatible. You could make a reasonable argument that it creates more tech-support work for other mod makers, but that seems like a logistical (forum moderation, perhaps) issue rather than a fundamental problem.
-It breaks the number one ethics rule in any kind of modding, starsector modding or otherwise: Allow mods to OPT IN, don't force other modders to opt out or "code around" your mod. It makes it easier on both parties and helps with bug hunting. And by the looks of it, I'm not even seeing a way to opt out either...
- As Midnight said, it is ethically *highly* frowned upon to create work for other modders.
Citing "ethics" here is a long stretch for the above reasons, and I wager you know that and you are using the word in a more discipline-specific sense.
Some of this reeks a little of the same smell from that thread for xenoargh's balance mod, where much of the behavior and tone by respondents was frankly disgraceful for a community for a game that benefits greatly from different mod options. Assuming that individual players ("fools") can't be responsible about using mods by default is rather denigrating and pretentious, and in any case, it is not your business how others choose to play a singleplayer game with no scoreboard or competitive element, especially one where mods and base content are open in structure and easily modifiable by the end user. But it is also not anyone's obligation to support people who can't be responsible with using mods.
All that aside, I do think that there is an unsolved issue for authors that would rightfully like to hide some of the content in their mod, exert some control over how the individual mod is played, or discourage people from peeking into the files and ruining the well-crafted surprises (I regret looking at the Blade Breaker content and generation stuff before having experienced it in-game, for example). It would be nice if there was an idiomatic or officially supported way to do this. That's a separate question from whether this mod should be on this board. This one probably does warrant an incompatibility notice, though.
Regarding the mod itself:
I think it is a little bit too easy gameplay-wise, since money is so easy to get and the fleets aren't all that hard. It might be more fun if the trigger was something more difficult or fun but still more generatable by the player, like making it loot remnant fleets with custom compositions that require specialist fleets or are super difficult or something. It makes stuff too accessible for me to keep playing with it on.