You can retrain the personality and which skills are elite on exceptional officers. They can fit into any fleet with minimal augmentation of your fleet unless you’re purposefully limiting yourself, which is not a problem a challenge play-through would have since the point is already to avoid min-max scenarios. The less room there is to get them guaranteed, the better, imo.
To reiterate like said earlier so it doesn’t derail, I do think this the OP actually a good idea at heart. It’s good to make sure players who might not do too many playthroughs get an extra potential route to see an exceptional officer.
Anyway. I really can’t think of a fleet that can’t use 4 exceptional officers, even duplicates of all 4. Having 5 elite skills without requiring automated ships is worth the adjustment to your fleet. I’m working off of memory though so maybe I’m forgetting one of the presets. My experience is from reading the patch notes when the presets were introduced and when I had a save where I got 3 of them once and I thought they’d be inferior to my custom made officers until I noticed I could retrain them like my other officers.
That’s different from, closest example I can think of, Sentinel ships which are slightly random to which ones you’ll be able to salvage per run and an onslaught won’t quite fit into every fleet.
