One thing I like about this last batch of changes is it seems easier now to protect lone ships against missile spam, specifically precursor spam. Like, point defense used to be a "commit to it" or else type deal, now it seems if you up-armor your survey ships just a bit, and give em decoys and some basic ECM missile jamming, they have a somewhat significant chance of not always being shredded by AMMs. Would it be optimal to protect them at all? Not sure, but it's certainly a nice RP thing if you want to look after your troops. That and it seems a lot of players measure utility in a hard cost / tonnage vs damage / protection metric where there's other softer metrics that can mean more, like not having to keep retool a shipyard if you lose a bunch of survey ships, for example. (Or if you follow Steve's "contact" house rules, which I do, it means you get to know right away that there's a hostile presence in a system rather than having to wait for another ship to stumble into the region).
"