I frankly fail to see where this change from "Skills that improved salvage ability and resilience" to "random stuff" is supposedly coming from.
It lost the reduced CR loss to hyperspace storms, and the bonus rare resource finds completely, I can see that. It also lost the dmod maintenance cost reduction stuff, and the dmod impact reduction stuff, but gained overall maintenance cost reduction and two very powerful tools for handling dmods. The other stuff, like extra resources from salvage, extra fuel, extra ship recovery, etc. is all there. It even gained aspects of other trees that I think fit better with it than their old homes, like fuel usage reduction from tech, and the guaranteed recoverability feature of leadership, in an admittedly roundabout way.
Also I think people are generally underselling just how strong field repairs can be. Make sure all of your officers have one of the industry skills, and throw bulkheads on your non-officered ships, and suddenly all losing ships in battle costs you is some crew and supplies. You always get them back, and when you do they only get 1 dmod or so on average, which simply falls off after awhile. At least for me its made me feel much more comfortable with not save scumming to avert losses.
Further, the changes to fleet cap make salvaging ships as a way to grow and improve the fleet, and thus a "salvage playstyle", much more feasible. You no longer need to intentionally stay below the thirty ship cap just so you actually have a chance of something useful dropping from a fight. If you already have 30 ships, you can still take your pick and then eat a pretty modest supply penalty until you can drop the excess off somewhere and reorganize.
The tree still has issues sure, like the choice between saving fuel and saving supplies being kind of underwhelming due to the similarity in end goal, letting the fleet stay out longer and for cheaper. Derelict contingent is pretty wonky and overtuned, and likely needs to be reworked fairly heavily. The colony skills aren't very good in the face of alpha core use as well, though this isn't exactly a new problem for them. The tree also doesn't scale quite as well as before due to the implementation of softcaps, but that is ultimately just a number tuning sort of thing.
In my own game where I focused industry out the gate as I had in .91 and generally played with a heavy focus on salvage and exploration, it felt... largely the same, except I didn't need to worry about dmods, so net positive. I didn't run a commission or prioritize bounties or anything, just gathered up exploration missions and went out to do my thing, coming back to the core worlds every third of a cycle or so to pick up new missions, stock up on fuel, and sell off anything particularly shiny. Fuel was more of a limiter than before without the relevant skill, but not by a whole lot and I usually had other reasons to head back to civilized areas by then anyway.
