The problem is lackluster progression. It's too easy to get cash and good ships. Game allow you easily skip whole early phase. So why bother with early ships?
The whole game progression is honestly a joke. Too much fixated on end game. So much that the journey to it started disappear.
And even easier for the enemy to grow their bounty fleets bigger and faster than the player can upgrade naturally early in the game. So even if player wants to progress slower, he should not because the world generates nothing but massive late-game sized fleets after completing more than a few bounties, except for the rare single 50k bounty that appears occasionally. Also, later on, system bounties tend to appear after massive pirate raids, and pirates raid with massive fleets.
So, player needs easy money and access to good ships and weapons to keep up with the world.
Also, the stipend runs out after two years, so player needs to income from somewhere, and it if it is colonies, then he needs near endgame fleet to defend against crises.
Older releases did a better job prolonging the early game (if the player wanted), and weaker ships were more useful provided they were not too rare. (Some ships in older releases like Tempests were too rare for the player despite NPCs using lots of them, and ship boarding was random and difficult.)
Today, player is pushed toward endgame quickly by the world. If player cannot keep up, he will not be able to fight anyone except the occasional 50k bounty that is not worth chasing.
