I would not like this.
The problem with Hull Restoration with regards to repairing your fleet is the player often has a huge backlog of ships to fix, and using Hull Restoration alone will take several months or even a few years to fix all the ships. Also, it would encourage the player to reload the game after any casualty because he does not want to wait even longer for ships to get fixed.
Restore is expensive. It is cheaper to build a new ship than to restore a damaged one. Factions do not restore their ships because they can simply build a new one for less cost (if we pretend NPCs have resources, which they do not thanks to infernal game magic). In earlier 0.9.x releases without s-mods, Hull Restoration, and exotic ships (no Automated Ships skill or Ziggurat), when a ship died late after I have Orbital Works, I scuttled it and built a new one. Now, with s-mods and exotic ships, player is encouraged to keep their ships permanently and revive them somehow like jRPG party members, while NPC factions can simply replace what they lost. Restore should be kept for player who has money to burn and needs their party member resurrected now. (I will use Restore on anything worth about 50k or less late in the game if it means less backlog for Hull Restoration.) That said, I almost pity the one who wants to pay nearly two million credits to restore Ziggurat after looting it from Alpha Site.
Nearly all of the anti-Ordos fleets are fully min-maxed for combat, and Industry after tier 2 is avoided aside from Derelict Operations builds.
If things changed so that Hull Restoration is the only way to fix ships, then new Hull Restoration should be tier 1, although that would probably mean no bonus max CR per s-mod (which is critical for Ziggurat and alpha Radiant). Even then, it would be very annoying for players who literally cannot spare a single point in a tree. The current build I use has no Leadership, which means no carrier skills (to make bombers useful) or Wolfpack Tactics (for frigates to have enough PPT) or Crew Training (to boost max CR). One point cost for tier 1 is not cheap enough when I want all fifteen points elsewhere.
Not fond of the idea of using s-mods on Restore. The game needs less ways to turn s-mods into a currency that encourages players to grind multi-Ordos late for story points. Currently, story points are effectively rare green credits to be spent on permanent upgrades instead of story things, and every story point spent gets tracked by historian's journal, which gets messy with all the upgrade purchases. The game needs to make several things that use story points (especially colony upgrades) use credits or another limiter instead so that endgame is less about grinding Ordos two or three at a time for story points.