Reading most of the points in this thread, I seem to miss the one or two crucial points that makes Starsector the enjoyable, hardcore, replayable game it is.
One of them is that there is a certain lack of balance. I strongly disagree that ships should be balanced to the T. There should be a lot of weaker ones, some good ones, and then some OP ones. It models how realistic group mechanisms work.
Similarly, the little aggravating things, like getting knocked around in an asteroid field, are injections of real issues that kick in most of the time. Just as the bickering of the factions, getting harrassed by the powerful while you are not, or getting mobbed on while you are the top dog, all of the experiences I have had in the game are giving back very similar, familiar, lifelike feelings to the gameplay, which brings in a level of rewarding feelings for simply playing and interacting in the game, that would be neigh impossible if you would be pillowed by hoards of QOL features.
This obviously does not mean that every QOL is bad. This is to say most are actually unnecessary, and can harm the game's response to the player's efforts, which are usually a lot more in depth, and virtually unmeasurable, such as 'feeling accomplished'.
I hope there will be little to no changes in most of the game's state QOL, and especially balance-wise.
But that might be only my extreme stance on this...