If the "counterplay" is "more micromanagement", I cannot say I am in favor of it.
Some small scope of it, as a tradeoff.
As it is now - most of our bases are just skeletons of the bases, because we really need no harbor tugs and tenders, nor tankers aside of major fleet operations and (not always) deep survey.
With my suggestion implemented - we'll need some stable harbor ship composition, but we'll not need to
use it frequently - we'll need just to have it in place or to humble about some losses for the god of Void. And it will be meaningfull choice in most cases: you'll need to choose better places for your bases, balance your support infrastructure, but it will be one-time decision for nearly every base, no boring every year routine as with combat ships overhauls and cargo flows; you'll need constant flow (building) of tugs, tankers and tenders, but it will be a flow of nearly the same classes (maybe with some modernizations from time to time), so no need to retool your shipyards serially (or look at an idle one and make yourself believe forcefully that it's ok to have lazy governors in this scope), when you have done a series of tankers and now you need no such ships for the age, but now you need several tugs, and several years later your yards are idle again, because now you need no tugs any more for ages...
That's the micro! That is a dilemma between boring and disbelievable!
So the game will benefit from being more deep and steady.
Look at it in the same light as at commanders'' accidental deaths. There are some small chances that any commander can be killed in accident. Is it adding a micro? Yes, in some small scope. But it's adding a deepness both in your personnel policy and in your story.
Ships are the same.
If my ship runs out of MSP or suffers a critical failure due to something I did - poor design, pushing it beyond its operating limits, and so on - then it is my failure, and knowing this is a possibility makes the decisions that lead to those cases interesting. There is a tangible story which has led to this, or which could have led to this. It's not "my failure" if my engine blows up due to a random dice roll.
You have nearly no chance to such random dice roll now, if your design is not skimpy and your orders are just not feckless (aside of combat conditions). You have ZERO chances to this random dice roll with all commercial designs - they are now ideally trouble-free and everlasting, and there is no option to have some balanced variant: your choices are just "have failures and MSP" (and so micro) or "trouble-free and everlasting" (and so disbelieve).
So, I think it will be good to have an option to set more balanced rule.
If you have no such desire - don't turn it on.
The same as for
new spoilers (those are very much in the same deepness-in-the-sky flavour).
A good narrative IMO has a meaningful cause and effect which feeds back to the gameplay.
It is so for the short story or the play (theatrical). It is obviously not so for novel-scope story. And Aurora is making novel-scope stories undoubtedly; there is a univerce-scope scenery, not a chamber-scope. Universe is a place, where accidents are inevitable everywhere and they are forming the structure of civilization. My strong preference is to play with more scope, though, again, it have to be
optional feature, because, yes, there are players that will prefer lean stories.
I think usually when we talk about such ships we are talking about sizes >100 HS
I'm talking also about sizes from FACs (that are often somehow decennary-autonomous) to frigate-size deep surveyors (nearly everlasting because why not, isn't it?), missile and PD ships.
But it's not a main point. More important that now we are not paying much for overspecialization (because nearly no chance, that some accident will take down, say, PD half of your squadron and so you're a toast), and therefore we are getting sucked in more-and-more-combat-ships-because-it-is-the-only-efficient-way micromanagement maelstrom, where you'll have nearly the same dilemma: to pretend that it's an accident probability where game-wise there is no (and to make accidents to youself manually, just to have a story coherent), or to play with rules you have and be more and more sucked in late game micro.
I do agree that things are generally balanced as it is.
The problem, I think, that it's balanced with seemings, not with decision-making dynamics.
With new spoilers it can become more apparent.