As a modder, one thing I wanted to ask in regards to the procedural generation portion of exploring and content:
How "easy" do you anticipate it to be for a modder to get their own stuff into the procedural portion of the game? Will this be supported at all?
I'm definitely keeping it in mind as I'm working on this, so I suppose the answer is "as easy as I could possibly make it".
In some cases, that's pretty easy. In other cases, it may be a bit more involved. Sorry this is kind of a non-answer.
Ok, an example: adding new planet types to the built-in procedural generator is easy. Adding new star types, on the other hand, is more difficult, because star types are columns in some of the spreadsheets involved where planets are rows - for example, a row for a planet in a specific spreadsheet will have probability multipliers for specific star types.
It's still possible to add new star types, however, because the data in the row is exposed and can be altered by code on application load. So you'd add a new star type (a row in a specific sheet) and the on load, iterate through all the planet specs - where star types are columns - and set whatever multipliers you need to with code. (If you don't, they'll all default to 1, meaning that star will be exactly average.)
(To complicate things further, planet types can *also* be columns, such as when a certain planet type has a higher chance for other planet or terrain types to be orbiting it. But that's not the case that often, where for stars, the whole point of adding a new star type is usually what kind of stuff orbits it.)
For salvage/exploration related entities, it *should* be on the easier side, but I haven't finished all the work on the data spec.
I had a whole lot before when it was a text file and I could just edit the exact variants that spawned and fairly easily write the code to spawn them wherever I wanted. Now I have to make the 8-12-16 unit group point system try and play nice when certain ships require others to be effective. 
It sounds like the easier way to go for you would be to write custom fleet generation code for your faction. You don't actually *have* to use the doctrines or the FleetFactoryV2 stuff, it's just there but you're not required to use it. IIRC you can even write code using the old system - not 100% sure on that, but I don't recall taking out support for it. Of course, that's not aware of markets/stability/etc. But your custom code could be.
This is sort of the approach I'm taking, right - there's a default way of doing something, but if that doesn't work, then you can roll your own. Likewise, for procedural generation, there's nothing stopping you from not hooking into the procgen system and instead doing your own pass over the Sector once procgen is finished.
