Skills/XP should be eliminated from the game. The kind of bonuses skills provide should instead be provided by hiring specialist crew/officers, hullmods, and special ships. Which you buy with money, or by having a good reputation for doing stuff.
And by actually just becoming better at playing the game.
Skills/XP encourages grinding: it's a simple way to make games 'addictive'; to keep people who aren't really that interested in the actual gameplay or world you've built to just merely continue playing to reach the "next level," to experience the mindless, chordate pleasure of seeing a progress bar fill up.
Disagree. System as is is both realistic and more strategic wrt gameplay. Realism: In real life, before you can learn engineering or medicine, you need to study "useless" mathematics and biology.
I disagree Mr Parrot!
In real life you get better at a thing by doing that thing. In Starsector you can do a bunch of salvage, get XP, and then press a magic button that makes all your bullets go 25% faster. Does that make any sense at all? Yea, most computer RPGs, stupidly, do the same thing. It's a worn-out paradigm from like 40 years ago. More suited to tabletop D&D than computer games.
If you must have some kind of XP/skills, instead, there should be "aptitude XP" in each of the four aptitudes. Actually doing stuff in that aptitude category would make increasingly expert officers and crew specialists in that category more willing to work for you. For some technology and industry related ships/hullmods, aptitude XP would give you a better bonus from them.
But there should be no way to be better at combat, aside from becoming, well, better at combat.
So these are some ideas for the different ways to earn "aptitude XP"
Combat: Raw Number of damage done in your non autopiloted ship.
Industry: Planets you've surveyed, tonnes of salvage recovered, ships recovered, etc.
Leadership: Good overall ratio of your crew killed vs enemy crew killed; effective use of fighters.
Technology: effective use of i-pulse and stealth, finding derelicts, shipwrecks, etc in systems, capping points, deploying ECM ships, etc.
But it just makes no sense, and it also makes the game comically easy, that you can just press a button and use like 50% less supplies for daily maintenance, mostly from XP you got blowing stuff up. That bonus should only come from hiring a bunch of expert mechanics, or having a logistics officer assigned to some ship.
Or that you can press a button and the "go dark" ability becomes twice as effective. What? Why? Isn't this the most boring way possible to do this? Wouldn't it be more interesting to do this with a bunch of hull mods that reduce your heat signature, or some souped up ECM ship/officer that makes your signature closer to background radiation?