Reading through the change list, I played around with a few paper designs and made a few calculations. Overall impression: The new ruleset seems less robust in some ways. I mentioned some of the points earlier, sorry for the repetition...
For point defence weapons, which will be firing many many shots at low hit rates, cost-effectiveness will be hugely important: weapon cost is directly proportional to "ammunition expenditure". This mostly kills long-ranged weapons for area defence, except as a last resort.
Area defence with small weapons remains useful for very fast interceptors that can keep pace with enemy missiles, assuming that's still achievable.
Despite the reduction of Gauss research costs and the increased efficiency of turret gear, bottom-of-the-barrel railguns may be preferable to anything else as point defence because of breakdown costs.
Similar considerations apply to long-ranged beam combat, because we also have low hit rates here. Shooting near the limit of (balanced-research) particle beam range would be harder on the firing ship than on the target. Highest priority would be anything that improves relative hit rate - fire control range and E(C)CM rather than the weapons themselves, probably being shield-heavy (allows suffering no real damage at closer range, saving wear and tear on the guns). If we can control the range without very stressed and fuel-hungry engines, we may favour slow-firing weapons - with most lines, 5 C1 weapons will incur 1/5 of the costs per shot than 1 C5 weapon.
Encouraging holding fire when hit chances are low is a nice concept, but problematic in Aurora because of the very low beam ranges. Beam fring rates are comparable to 20th century wet navy ships, but the difference between extreme and modest range against a retreating target can be closed in seconds rather than hours. Long-range shots with most lines are penalised in terms of damage as well as accuracy, further shortening effective range if there's any meaningful cost to firing a weapon.
Changes to missile launchers strongly favours something that was first among equals anyway: Box launchers in parasites (possibly engineless or otherwise bare-bones) to get around reloading limits.
Somewhat-reduced launchers become bulkier, full-sized ones suffer most from weapon malfunctions, directly-mounted box launchers are now dangerous (and another RP sink to only mitigate the risk somewhat).
New sensor model overwhelmingly favours small ships when it comes to mutual detection range. This pretty much solves missile-vs-missile combat from the get go, if that remains relevant at all (lack of salvo restriction makes lots and lots of cheap flak even more viable. We also lose point blank missile fire - imo, that was a good desperation measure that was more likely to breathe life into an otherwise one-sided situation than to be a balance problem, and also gave CIWS some validity).
Changes to fuel logistics strongly encourage ruthlessly optimising designs for fuel efficiency, which imo was already very attractive (tonnage efficiency suffers, but not cost efficiency). Now we have a bunch of techs lines soaking up RP and some logistics concerns that we can simply evade at design time, without any major concessions.
Likewise, getting propulsion design slightly wrong will be even more costly.
Changes to maintenance, especially the way MSPs are handled, seems to encourage ignoring the system. Plentiful engineering, scrap or abandon/salvage at end of life. Used to be a viable niche choice, now it seems more efficient than playing by the system.
Also not helpful: New components encourage large ships, and as I understand it the equipment failure system still gives up when faced with large ships carrying many cheap components. This is especially relevant combined with large low-tech weapons being less affected by weapon failure.
I'm excited about ground combat, AI changes, varied NPR design themes, more fleshed-out diplomacy, performance and other quality-of-life improvements...
but many basics pertaining to ship design, one of the core strengths of the game, seem less open-ended despite added complexity, and more prone to "one right way" rather than a wide range of reasonable trade-offs with different soft counters. Furthermore, the favoured one often seems unintuitive.