I was hoping that the skill would actually not transfer your skills, and would have kept the skills of the officer of the ship you have transferred yourself to. So this way you could have invested in other trees than combat, while also having the opportunity to contribute to battle on a piloted ship that wouldnt suck because you have no combat skills.
My guess is that would be unbalanced and leads to undesirable incentives in skill allocation. Trading in 1 character point to get the equivalent of 5 or 6 from another tree seems to completely defeat the purpose of that other tree. We've got access to 8 officers baseline, losing 1 isn't a big deal for many fleets, so Neural Link would become mandatory, and you'd grab 2 more tier 5's, and ignore combat completely every time.
In my view, it is much better to have synergy between trees as opposed to outright obsoleting another tree. As it stands, if you never use the switching, at a minimum it's the equivalent of +1 officer. If you do use the quick switching, it potentially gives you a hard to quantify force multiplier.
And something like that feels like something that can compete with the redacted skill as alternatives for the end of tech tree. This way you still can pilot the radiant, but youd have to spend 10 sp for that. Or you can have a strong tech/leadership combo, taking command of the fleet as a general aboard kite in the back, transferring yourself back and forth from time to time to make adjustments to your ship positioning/venting/etc.
I'll note it is actually 8 skill points according to the blog. 7 points invested lets you grab the 2nd top tier skill, for a total of 8. And combining an Alpha Core Radiant that has 8 elite combat skills with player piloting with no investment in combat skills would be crazy strong. 8 Tech, 7 leadership would be optimal every time. All the fleet bonuses, all the officers bonuses, and a top tier combat skilled 60 DP flagship. Spending points in the combat tree with such an ability in play would be a mistake, since you could always get exactly the same bonuses plus more bonuses on top of them with Neural Link.
Also, I'm not quite understanding the "General piloting a kite" play style being combined with Neural link. If you want to occasionally tweak a ship, you can do that now. From what I understand, as soon as you leave the ship to transfer command, it goes back to it's previous officer. So if you just want to order a vent, you can transfer in by being close by in your kite, order the vent, then transfer back, with the ship maintaining officer bonuses before and after.