I tend to keep a lot of spare ships in storage. I re-arrange my fleet based on whether I'm doing a lot of exploring (usually nothing larger than a few cruisers, using Revenants for faster travel) or bounty hunting/base exterminating (4-8 capitals, Prometheus) and then 5-6 pursuit ships (Fury, Medusa, Tempest) for chasing down the reserve ships trying to run away.
As such, I tend to try to build my officers so they work with just about any build. I do usually have a couple with Beam Weapon Mastery, but very few (of my) beam ships don't also have ballistics (I really like Eagles and Falcons), so I don't worry about those being redundant skills. I like to have at least a few with Missile Specialization because that's equivalent to expanded missile racks (and I think it stacks with expanded missile racks).
I tend to build my fleets for long duration battles, so I definitely try to have combat endurance on all of my officers, but it is never 100%. For the same reason, I am ok with more defense oriented skills, although I still think a good offense has more impact on survivability than defense when it comes to officer skills.
As such, I'm pretty happy, in general, with the random officers I find, and rarely dismiss them based on their skill tree. I am more likely to dismiss them based on their attitude. I run pretty much straight Steady officers, sometimes with one or two aggressive, but not reckless for some ships that do better with those officers.
