... Actually, the most meaningful was that it just was too much work to outfit so many ships. ...
It feels as if it was a solution looking for a problem.
That's basically what it's there for, to more or less gently tell the player not to do that. That's *all* it's there for; it's not meant to be a limit on player power. And it's really not. I mean, if the limit was 5 ships or some such, then it would be, but it's set high enough that it's not a meaningful limitation in terms of power. And in the next release, you'll be able to recover ships without issue when at or near the limit (and go over the limit, for a large supply cost increase), so that's the main point of friction removed.
An important thing to note is that with the skill revamp, a lot of the fleetwide skill effects drop off when you have more than a certain number of deployment points for a certain type of ship (that's affected by the effect). The number and the type of ship that matters varies for different skills.
The question is, will this be enough to mimic a deployment points-based fleet size limit, without the added complication of actually having one?
The main point of conflict with that, imo, is if you needed to bring a bunch of combat ships just for "weight" to get more deployment points onto the battlefield. In which case, losing the fleetwide skill bonuses might be worth getting 50% more deployment; that'd be a problem. On the other hand, enemy fleets now have more quality and less quantity, so you both don't need as much paper "strength" to get a decent deployment, and would be at more of a disadvantage facing a higher-quality enemy fleet if you did get that strength at the expense of quality.
Hmm. If needed, one solution might be to, say, only count ships with officers for "fleet strength" as far as deployment points go. That'd remove the incentive to stack a bunch of ships you don't intend to use. I kind of want to see where it ends up first, though. In any case, adding a more mechanically complex fleet size limit seems premature, when there are mechanics that could very well produce the same results anyway.