@The Soldier
Look man I love Alex as much as the next guy, you can find me orgasming with excitement on literally any other blog post, but let's not put him on a pedestal as an ascended being who's perfect. He can make bad calls, wrong decisions, not everything he decides to develop for the game is good. If the vast majority of the community doesn't like something, why should we be okay with it, purely because it keeps being explained like it's some sort of hypnotic act?
The other examples you've given are completely different from this discussion. You can't compare a sub faction in Starsector (when there's <10 factions total) to a single item in Skyrim that has thousands of items. If every LG ship was somehow unique (not just a bit worse), and then that uniqueness made 1 or 2 of their ships obviously inferior to the base variants, I'd be 100% fine with that. If you want to draw a parallel to Skyrim, imagine one weapon class, say two-handed swords. Now imagine there comes a new set of weapons, looking different and being called differently, only to find they're the exact same two-handed swords that just deal less damage compared to the originals, without any other benefit or perk of any kind. Tell me that's good game design.