I really must reiterate that I don't think combat should be built around the notion that the player never loses ships.
This is what I dislike about named bounties. You lose a capital, there goes about a half million credits, and you only get the bounty which is less than the cost. (I consider the vendor trash loot as coverage of expenses like repairing and refueling your fleet.) Even fighting 150k bounties against their multiple cruisers seems like a bad idea when my fleet is evenly matched at best and I may not have a colony yet. (Usually, I have Apogee and destroyer clunkers vs. their pristine multi-cruiser fleet.)
I do not consider named bounties worth it unless the chance of victory without any casualties is high. By the time I can do this with mid-level bounties, they quickly spike again to ludicrous multi-capital fleets (when I may not have yet acquired a capital of my own), and by the time I can do it again against endgame fleets, the combat game is won, and I avoid named bounties altogether so I can focus on the whack-a-mole zombie pirate threat that will devour the core worlds if I do not intervene (which hurts too).
We have confirmation that Alex is reducing the punishment of D-mods so hopefully that will help reduce the prevalence of this mindset. Megas brought up story point hullmods increasing the desire for min/maxers to not lose any ships with this investment, and so I think it would be a good idea if these hullmods were kept intact when recovering a disabled ship.
Today, in the current release, if we lose a ship, we can trivially replace it (in late-game) by building another one. Cheaper than shops, and it comes with free crew, fuel, supplies, and weapons! Late in the game, I do not mind losing ships in battle, and I splurge on replacement ships thanks to high income.
Next release, if we want to rebuild the ship, it probably does not get permamods granted by story points builtin for free, so player will need to spend two or three story points per ship replaced. This is like a level drain. On the other hand, if we want to restore the ship to avoid paying the story point tax, instead of paying bargain prices from our Orbital Works, we pay an exorbitant cost in credits much higher than our Orbital Works or even shops from NPC markets. Combine that with gameplay changes that may likely lower income, restoration of large or high-performance ships seems a dumb idea, and it will probably be faster to reload and try again instead of taking the loss and spending too much time grinding up back to square one.
Because Loadout Design 3 does not exist next release, we will need those permamods to outfit our otherwise OP-starved ships.