If they don't already (and if they do I've not seen it), would it be possible for officers to improve their skills faster through combat experience (relative to the normal slow progression when in command of a ship/fleet/ground unit)? I would love to be able to train a ground combat officer up through intentional combat tours, e.g. boarding commercial prizes, capturing mining outposts, etc, before throwing them into the all-consuming fire that is a homeworld assault.
On a related note, how about adding a "prize command" skill that lets a naval officer reduce the "recovery" time before a captured prize ship is fully operational?
On an even more tangential note, it would be cool to have some economic reason (and in-game mechanism) to assign junior officers to customs duty (ala Honor Harrington in "On Basilisk Station" and countless other sci-fi novels). Maybe there could be some positive impact to Wealth collected from "Tax on Exports or Tax", "Shipping Trade Gods", "Tax on Shipping Colonists" and/or whatever it's called when you start trading with NPCs. Up to Steve whether that was granular enough to require actual customs cutters with assigned officers, or if it was more of an abstraction, like a role that could be assigned similar to Academy Commandant.