Given the large number of mods for the game and the interdependencies on the Libraries for a lot of them to work, I think it would make sense to expand the mod manager in the launcher or in a separate EXE to include a means to individually enable and disable each ship type in game as well as modify their stats in the launcher before launching the game, and to build in means to make a system that could work as a means to fit between the libraries to make the libraries supporting instead of dependencies for the game. With graphics lib this will obviously require a building of a higher performance version of graphics lib.
For mods like LunaLib it might make more sense to move it out of the game, and into this launcher expansion and add it's contents to a larger mod management schema so that everything in every mod is on a toggle and can be turned on and off and every property has a tree of everything it's reliant on and things it uses to cut down on redundancy in performance mode while still allowing higher graphical fidelity when everything is set to max.
I think that given how much work and love the community has put into the game I think it would be fitting for all of the mods to be accommodated more extensively and for there to be a better management system for each individual non-standard component for the game and to possibly outline a set of standards for naming ships in the file system to fit some kind of regex that'll take everyone's naming preferences into account while tidying up the entire wealth of mods into a much cleaner regular structure that'll allow them to be more customizable, easier to balance quickly using curves, and a great big dynamic balance table with everything all in one place up front and easily accessible.
I think it would make for a good modding project but I don't really know where I would start with this or if it would be more sensible to ask someone experienced to handle most of this. Obviously ideally this would be great if alex could do all this since it is his game he he obviously knows it better than pretty much anyone, but I don't know what his limitation are in terms of using the content made by the modding community or how much this would upset people who may be forced to change their mods by having to comply with a new standard or different naming schema.
I think there is a way to unpack all mods into a standard format, take them all rename them into something that fits a regex and doesn't change things up too badly, then find where there are overlaps in approaches, or redundancies between mods, then rename them all and reupload the to a temporary location so everyone who modded can see how their structures differ from everyone else's and then begin finding a way to structure a commonality between them all to make a management gui that fits everything. It should also make updating each mod between versions based on changes to the base game easier too and I think it would probably also make most people's lives easier and add a tonne of stuff to the game accessible from the launcher and I think it would be possible to make a second log file linked directly to a standardized pointer for each mod to show which one did what to crash the game where so it would make a lot of sense for the modders the people playing the mods, and probably also whoever is working on the game itself if this was added.
I played the game after seeing all the posts about it and videos on youtube with everyone screaming about how many ships there were and I ended up playing to the end and being severely disappointed that I'd run out of things to do. It was really good up until the realisations set in that I'd actually completed the entire set of things to do (I think, maybe I didn't and it's just not clear that there is a lot more to it) after doing all the quests and exploring and scanning every single system completely and then fighting some ships for the to access the tidal shunt and then I was out of extra things to do and hitting up the wiki showed I'd fought every single ship. So presenting the mods in a manner where they're kinda up front and accessible like launcher options makes a lot of sense. I am kind of hooked on the game tbh I had so much fun but when I ended up realising I had done everything It felt like this was really the first 10% of a game and I was going to get my mind blown when some big reveal showed that the Galatia academy was just the starting mission.
I think there is a tonne of potential in this game and I think the modding community have produced some really (mostly) stellar content. So thank you to everyone who made such a huge amount of effort making new ships and weapons. I think that the vast majority of what you have all produced is absolutely excellent. If anyone has a suggestion of a place to start with getting this going or knows of anyone who could help out with some tools that allow at least a starting point for this or a way to make the modders in general aware that this is probably feasible and a way to make some moves towards getting a format set up that would be able to encapsulate most of this and make swapping components out more modular between mods by making each mod in itself modularizable I think I would be able to slowly start looking at this and working towards at least some general idea of what would be specifically necessary to make this work.