My og thought was raising the monthly payroll according to the ship they’re commanding but money takes no cargo space and it doesn’t matter when player has infinite money while hurting early game big times.
I don’t see what grind is needed. You’re already bringing heavy machinery and maybe volatile and metal plates and rare metal tubes so I wouldn’t feel much of a hassle to add another three. They’re all products of light industry and shouldn’t be hard to come by.
I am generally against a arbitrary limit on officer count. Currently, it’s 8-10 to distribute among 160-240 DP, which is 16-30 DP per officer, giving cruiser spam or few cap with frigs being the most “optimal” composition of fleet. A lower officer limit simply would encourage more capitals. The point is, people will always try to fill every DP with officered ship or maximum officer level per DP (as you suggested) to max out fleet strength.
A non-officered ship is nothing but cannon fodder. Maybe that will change with the Support Doctrine but ironically it’s the last tier of Leadership instead of Industry, which probably means you’re still able to field a lot of officered ship, considering the removal of wrap-around mechanism.
The grind would be looking for all the required resources. It can already be hard to find enough supplies and fuel for a large fleet, when those are available on every planet. Having to search around markets every month to meet your quota for a bunch of random resources would be a major annoyance. If you could trivially find enough resources for a full fleet of officers, then the suggestion is equivalent to removing the officer cap and increasing officer salaries, but with extra steps. To me, it's like having to clear out pirate bases once every few months: it takes you away from what you really want to do, but isn't interesting or challenging.
If the goal is just to have fully leveled officers in every ship, then do that. Resource fetching is not interesting IMO.
Unfortunately, the new battle size mechanics don't work well with unlimited officers in every ship though. That would have the opposite effect of over-incentivizing small ships to maximize the number of officers on the field (and thus the amount of DP available). That's the issue behind why remnant fleets with unlimited officers are so annoying, and the player would certainly want to match officer counts to deal with them if that were possible.
I'm not against having officers in every ship, but the all the mechanics and skills that interact with officers need to be balanced around it. It would probably require redesigning the DP mechanics that just got redesigned.
I think having certain ships feel a bit special and more powerful than the average ships is a good thing too. Maybe something like removing the officer cap, but reducing the max level to 2 or 3, and then having special events or missions that can let you get an extra level on one officer (and also the officer cryo-pods with high level officers that you can already find). That way you end up with a few stronger officers and bunch of low levels officers to fill out the rest of your fleet.