For me, d-mod removal is the selling point of Hull Restoration, and less of them after battle. Gut that, and there is little left. It is a
massive QoL skill, one that puts the combat losses bar from none (or one small ship) to losing about half my fleet. Restoration the normal way costs way too much and cranking out ships with Orbital Works only works for human ships, not exotics like automated ships.
My only gripe about Hull Restoration is I cannot get that, Automated Ships, Neural Link, and enough Combat skills to make piloting Radiant enjoyable. If I want to pilot Radiant, I need to give up Hull Restoration (and one or two more Industry skills) to get enough Combat skills to make Radiant flagship good enough.
Want to gut Hull Restoration? Make normal Restoration much, MUCH cheaper. I do not care if it breaks lore. I want casualties to be acceptable, and Hull Restoration is the only way.
I do not sit and wait for ships to be repaired. I haul them while I travel doing other things until they become clean then, I do not need them (because they eat into combat ship DP), store them.
But nerf the skill by making it take longer, instead of neutering it by completely changing its meta... hence why I instead suggested that repairs take longer or require above minimum crew.
Absolutely not! Last release, Field Repairs (which was effectively Hull Restoration) repaired one d-mod every two months, twice as slow as today. It was too slow! Only good for removing the few d-mods from the occasional casualty, not fixing up several ships with multiple d-mods. The current rate of one per month is acceptable, even if a bit slow to remove many d-mods. I probably would prefer two per month instead of one, but this is good enough. If Hull Restoration needs to be changed, it should repair even faster, or maybe offer discount to Restore for those who cannot wait.
I would prefer to get two combat skills instead of Hull Restoration (although Industrial Planning is still tempting because I am a colony fan), but since I cannot always stop my fleet from doing dumb things and getting themselves killed, I want the peace-of-mind of relatively painless casualties offered by Hull Restoration.
With that said, crew loss can be a problem, and it is a good idea to mitigate it somehow.
For bounty hunting, I would much rather increase my fleet's combat power and buy new ships, if any of the old ones get too damaged to be worth keeping. With raid discounts and contact special offers it can be quite cheap to get spotless ships, even if I don't have much control over what I get.
Buying new ships would not work for exotic ships that cannot be bought (and come with d-mods after battle). But I guess that can work now that s-mods get refunded into bonus xp when scrapped. I used to replace ships in earlier 0.9 releases when s-mods and exotic ships were not a thing, and everything could be minted out of Orbital Works.