Well this will be fun to discuss given what's out there. Well, onto the essay.
I'll start with this: A -lot- was added to the game. The new contact system gives tremendous control over your missions that wasn't there before and more missions to work with. The stealth ones may suck and bounties may need some work(I only came back recently so I won't have much to add on the front of bounty profit for a while.) New colony upgrades, the story point in-built systems, new ship designs, new raiding mechanics that made it a much better and more controlled option. If you're going to run down the idea that nothing was added, you're not going to see any sympathy from me.
Now, we do agree on the overkill enemy challenge, as does most of the playerbase it seems. But, I have no idea what that has to do with PvP,that just came off like wild rambling. I don't think it needed this level of officer at all(Sans the full end-game, but superbosses are fine,) given the difficulty of keeping a profit in combat scenarios so we agree there. But that is the end of my praise. If you have an issue with the difficulty curve then join the club. Alex put in notes he toned the officer spam down and it's a known issue on an entirely new system. It's one man with limited QA testing doing about as well as the entire team at paradox does with Stellaris, give some credit here.
You have made a lot of claims without any evidence behind it. I don't know whether that hyperbole for rhetorical purposes or not, but demanding everything is just blindly nerfed into the ground is frankly a bit too far. Reminder the phase didn't even have much in terms of upgrades before and still managed to be insanely overpowered fleet killers more than carriers, even with the complaints. So demanding "Carriers dont get easy upgrades now," is a bit unfair don't you think? Now again, the DP discussion is a well known complaint. To the point people named it the largest issue with the skill system, and very few disagree. But flat removing them on the spot is a waste of development time and ignoring the issue with overspecialization. There is little to no point to building general skills at all if you're going to only field one specific type of ship and nothing else. The point is to encourage broad fleet building rather than a stack of carriers you swapped between whenever your ship needed to pull back for CR or damage. Removing that entirely just means packing 10 Astrals and nothing but 10 Astrals is more effective than a broad fleet setup using what you can get. That isn't railroading, it's incentivizing like you wanted. The numbers are they are have too strict a drop sure, and If I wanted to spend time learning Java I'd do my own edits to cut both the slope of the diminishing returns and raise the "maximum," but removing it entirely is just as extreme.
The more I write this, the more I think the title and thesis is a lie. All of this is a discussion of balancing issues and difficulty curve. It has less than nothing to do with player options. It also shows, at to me, that you just wants a power trip to rip enemies apart, rather than a constant struggle to build your fleet up to galaxy grade levels. The only difficulty I've had as of late is keeping profit in bounty hunting, and I still routinely curbstop anything not the [redacted] capital ship with minimal to no losses. The only thing that brings it down is officer spam, which everyone knows about and can be fixed by using setting.jsom to cut officer pay heavily and raise the max number of them to 20. You demand incentivizing, but then the game gives you exactly what you want through the DP limit....being able to choose jobs gives better rewards for specializing your fleet without outright forcing you to. You demand all of this is taken out, and nerfed into the ground but it just comes with no evidence behind it.
Now, to some additional posts that aren't the original:
The problem I'm having is that I played StarSector to unwind. It was a chill time bumbling around in space doing whatever as I slowly meander toward some fuzzily defined goal.
But in the new version there's so much stuff either making what I want to do either a chore or flat impossible, it's just not chill anymore.
And the vast bulk of those problems come from the skills.
In previous versions I'd usually pick mostly similar skills every time specifically because they enabled more chill and less worry (QoL). And this was never an issue for me as I'm not interested in varying player ability for different playthroughs because I want the same thing out of the next game as I did from the current one.
Re-playability for me is not what the player can do, but what the player encounters.
First off, "making things easier for yourself" in terms of difficulty and enemy threats isn't quality of life. That's making the actual tool use simpler or more comrtable. Things like difficulty balancing and the balance between choices is another thing entirely. Regardless, I heavily disagree. If all you're doing is picking the same skills and ships every single time, then you aren't getting good replay value. If you run into the same build again and again without limit or care, then those minor differences in encounter aren't actually changing anything. In fairness that's just because the old system had just as many balancing issues and meta trash as anything else did. I don't grasp why people think the old system was some holy grail without flaws. People are complaining now because they deem there is only one meta, the OP included. Yet here you are confirming the old system wasn't any different in that.
You were never interested in the choices the skill system gave you. You admitted it yourself when you said you picked the same skills every single time. And yes your admitting that in this new system you actually consider your skills and make choices toward getting choice picks and figuring how to put more minor skills to synergistic use. If anything your disproving your own complaint, that your being restricted for no reason and replay value isn't added by this new skill system.
Against human bounties, PPT is the main enemy. So many enemy capitals, more than 0.9.1a ever had. I never saw twelve Conquests from a single fleet before 0.95a.
Uh....did we play the same game? That was a routine problem for level 10 bounties, that they -very quickly- skyrocketed to that exact kind of spam. I routinely saw 12 paragons in a fleet. And Alex admitted the 10 levle difficulty stuff became even harder, just more rare and controllable and easily spawned.
This update really limited player options by introducing new mechanics. An example is the hullmod integration system, with 3 integrated hullmod it is a huge power boost that without it players are gimping themselves, while the system itself does not offer more options. The choice of what to intergrate is not an option, it's too simple. Because before there were not enough points and you had to choose between hardened shields or tagerting, now it's just slap them both on. Less player choice.
The same thing with objectives, before objectives helped, but was not MANDATORY. See? Less player option. Same thing could be said for player builds in comparison. Now starsector almost forces the player to play a certain 'class' because all the gameplay funnels the player into one thing. Get ECM, Cap objectives, use phase or temporal shell mechanics. All the options are mandatory, therefore they are Not options anymore, just more checkboxes to fill.
What are you talking about. Choosing where to spend story points, on what ship, and how to manage it with bonus experience and methods of keeping story points around for emergency scenarios is a huge new system to work with and keep around. It's not easy to story point every single ship, and you still have to choose which ones to point and if you follow that by using the extra OP for better raw stats and guns, or mods you otherwise might not consider. Hell, at worse it's -changing- the choice, not outright removing it. As for objectives, are we playing the same game? I've gotten to [super redacted] and been fine just ignoring points for the most part and focusing on combat. a few frigates set to hold a position is fine, and they make excellent fallback points and flanking positions. I have no idea how you think tactics has anything to do with a "class" of character, or how you're in any way required to use phase ships or temporal shell. Again, even in the worst case interpretation your just like the OP, discussing -balancing- issues with the difficulty curve, not anything about player choice.