Id rather look at this as a place where there is room for improvement.
What is it that makes a real crew more "experienced" in combat?
The thing that would yield the most experience IMHO is actual total failure, ship destruction and escape in escape pods. Crew that manages to survive will come out of it with tons of more experience how combat, damage control, escape and the harshness of space works. That is why rescuing crews should be extra important.
Experience from ship damage feels like it should scale with severity of damage, so that these 1 damage spam don't make a crew elite so quickly. And it is also a good idea to make actual repairs of components yield experience due to the improvisation nature required that would be very useful both in future combat and damage control. Even repairs of maintenance breakdowns would make the crew know the ship ( and it's quirks ) better so they can adapt to them and knows what systems are likely to fail first in combat and can take measures.
Experience of actual combat also includes success, and most importantly seeing the effects weapons actually have on the target. What I would like to have here is a new mechanic where you can "inspect" wrecks with the military ships on site right after combat, to learn both about the effectiveness of your weapons, and of the weakness of the enemy ships. Think of it as a kind of boarding mechanic that involves a risk to a small part of the crew ( depending on size of destroyed ship/ships), but rewards you with most of the knowledge you would get from salvaging + extra crew grade.
I think this also would be really great for story telling! Just imagine all the stories of crew and captain boarding and inspecting shot up enemy ships or unknown derelicts floating in space...
And after all what military would not inspect the enemy wrecks after battle if the time for it exists? ( which most of the time it does ). Spacesuits should exist in abundance on most military ships and few defeated enemy ships are intact so boarding is generally not a problem.
Perhaps you would also need say 1 crew per 250 ton enemy ships, so that a fighter with a crew of 2 can't inspect an enemy Battleship ( but could very well inspect a knocked out enemy fighter ).
The danger associated with inspection should scale downward with time elapsed from destruction, 30 days after it should be minimal but 1 hour after destruction you could have everything from secondary explosions, hull breakups, structural collapses, fires, electrical shocks, defense AIs and stray survivors causing trouble for the crew you send over...