How often I use the ship designer, depends on what kind of game I'm playing. On occasion, when I'm swimming in resources after building a strong industry fleet, I can just auto-best everything and overwhelm enemies anyway.
On other builds, or in multiplayer, I need to put more effort into it. If the game was rebalanced properly, I could live without that feature, but, as is, I obviously prefer to have the option to fine tune my fleets.
I agree with the OP on the subject that balancing a customizable system like the ship designer is inherently much more challenging than working with fixed classes and ships. Kudos to the devs for continuing to iterate on it.
On other builds, or in multiplayer, I need to put more effort into it. If the game was rebalanced properly, I could live without that feature, but, as is, I obviously prefer to have the option to fine tune my fleets.
I agree with the OP on the subject that balancing a customizable system like the ship designer is inherently much more challenging than working with fixed classes and ships. Kudos to the devs for continuing to iterate on it.