It also only costs 2 story points to reassign skills into Hull Restoration for months of idle over-time repairs and back to one's normal skill set, which makes it even more cheesy.
Instead, I propose the over-time repairs effect (and only that) be removed and replaced with a large percentage reduction to dockside Restoration costs, perhaps a 50% cost reduction or even more. This turns the effect from an unpredictable lottery that encourages awkward meta-based fleet management to gain the desired outcome into a concerted choice, saves time, also saves vast sums of credits, and better complements the 'chance for Dmod removal on recovery' effect. Thoughts?
If it's just a respec to Hull restoration, save 50% credits instantly on X ships, respec back, I'm kind of not enthusiastic about such a change. It does nothing to avoid the "only costs 2 story points to reassign skills", and in fact, makes the opportunity cost even less, making that behavior more likely, not less. I don't think campaign layer instant benefits (as opposed to a benefit for having a skill over time or benefits directly in combat), are good, because they generally lead to that problem, namely metagaming skill reassignments even more.
Might as well just add a general option to spend a story point to halve the cost of the restoration of a ship, which avoids constant respec behavior.
In general, I'd much rather have over time campaign effects as that encourages me at least to play with the tree as opposed to using it as a one time instant windfall. At least in that case you're playing with the skill.
I do find it interesting there are some combat focused players who still won't touch Industry because it means taking at least 2 skills that don't affect combat directly (and potentially more if you're piloting a high tech doctrine ship). Typically Technology and Leadership combined with Combat is considered better from a maximal combat power perspective since it only forces you to take 1 non-combat related skill, and has multiple fleet wide buffs. Then there are posts like the OP here which suggest Industry is too strong.
I'll also point out, time is not free. This perhaps is more obvious to me because I play a fair bit of spacer start games. You are still paying your officers, supplies to keep CR up on the expensive to restore ship, and crew salaries. And potentially a mysterious debt. Not to mention simply loss of income from simply trading in the core worlds, which basically goes as fast as just sitting in orbit. Or bounty hunting with your slightly weaker, but still pretty powerful d-mod fleet. A 4 d-mod Paragon is still a Paragon, and will still defeat most ships 1 on 1 not named Radiant.
I'd also be hesitant to remove the d-mod over time removal and replace it with something less related, since players who intend to use the skill permanently would run into the issue that their already d-modded ships gain no benefit what so ever from taking the skill when they finally get around to it. Which would tend to make players take it as early as possible to get the most benefit (i.e. less d-mods on acquire or loss). Which feels weird to me.