I think you're overestimating the cut in PPT. PPT doesn't tick down unless the ship has enemy ships in sight.
Possibly, I'll admit I'm mostly basing my opinion on anecdotal evidence and not on statistics from testing. And I thought PPT only starts ticking down once enemy ship in sight, not that it also stops ticking down when enemy is again out of sight (so neither side on the way to the fight is punished, plus simulates wear & tear to ship from damage, etc.).
Stacking hardened subsytems with reliability engineering nearly doubles that time just from the drain reduction. Reliability engineering gives 15% more CR, nearly doubling the time again until malfunctions. Then there is crew training for another 15%.
Oh great, so now I have to also waste skill points in order to min/max SO... although I generally get Crew training (and maybe reliability engineering) anyway, so that is less of an issue (even less of an issue now that player can respec). This has some poor interaction with the wrap-around skill mechanic, but since that is going away soon, pointless to discuss further. As for whether an officer has that one skill... total crapshoot, RNG unless player specifically chooses reliability engineering while leveling officer up.
Frigates don't trigger PPT drain for cruisers so the ship can do this forever.
Since when? Maybe I missed that in the PPT tutorial (or it's new), but makes no sense otherwise. What, capital ships and cruisers can't be damaged/degraded by a frigate...? Which the Hyperion literally is.
SO ships need that speed boost not just to get to fights, they also need it to get in and out of enemy ranges so they can dissipate or to flank vulnerable enemies easily.
Actually, I had forgotten that SO
also reduces weapons range as an additional nerf/balancing, but seems well balanced since ship needs to use its higher speed to get closer to an enemy ship anyways. But for the life of me, I can't understand why it doesn't increase the likelihood of an engine flaming out as penalty instead... the hull mod is literally called "safety overrides!" But I think someone already pointed this out/complained about it, and Alex said something about how he had tested it that way at some point and it led to issues that necessitated doing something else instead.
Edit: I stand corrected, for some reason the game I guess requires some minimum level of nearby enemy presence for PPT to degrade, but it is tiered, so a cruiser requires (or at least used to require) a minimum of like 4 frigates to trigger. Very stupid and illogical gameplay choice, but from a code perspective, prolly significantly reduces and/or simplifies necessary calcs... but unless something has changed, frigates will trigger PPT loss in larger ships so long enough are present. So yeah, cheese away I guess by wasting a Falcon(P) on chasing frigates, or at least rushing to deny enemy a strategic point in battle! But I guess the PPT loss from SO is less of an issue for larger ships, since won't trigger PPT unless and until enough enemy ships nearby; which makes SO PPT loss even MORE of a penalty when used on frigates, though.