My understanding of Iranon's core concern (based on a post 20-30 up-thread) is the following statement (which may or may not be true): "A ship that is 10 years old will consume MSP when parked more rapidly than a ship that is 1 year old. This is a change from the previous behavior.
That's not how I understand it. Cost should be constant in orbit and gets progressively higher in deep space, same as before.
I saw it coming miles away. Its change, a lot of people don't like change. When change happens, they will argue the change no matter how it would affect whats changing
As perhaps the most vocal sceptic atm: I welcome changes. Both to refine things, and introduce interesting new options.
However: If a core mechanic is changed signicantly and it breaks something/causes significant balance issues/heavily rewards fiddly unintuitive things, the likely net result is a version that's inferior to the predecessor no matter how many cool new toys we get. Quite normal to happen a few times in sufficiently complex games that see major revisions.
The bad: I currently believe this to be the case. The good: fixing this after the fact should not be hard.
the formerly odd situation that needed to be addressed: Built maintenance points were very expensive compared to the complimentary load you received with ships (especially when maintenance storage bays are involved). Steve decided that the complimentary load was the sole problem and got rid of it. My experience points to pricing of regular MSP being part of the problem.
I experimented quite extensively with various ways to cut down on maintenance requirements, and many are viable even when cheap supply ships made them less beneficial.
For consistency's sake, I welcome the change of "no free MSP" (the alternative would be overly complicated - e.g. engineering bays would not have a fixed cost to account for how many MSP one adds). But I think balance requires this to come with a significant cost decrease rather than the slight increase we got.