well, unlike some games such as CoH/CoV, WoW which only have a limited set of choices for customization (creating the character in those games cases), the shipbuilder has a potential for a near infinite combinations because there are so many choices and many hardpoints, and each piece actually adds hardpoints, so it'll look like some randomized mess with possibly hundreds of thousands of pieces and you don't even know what's connected to what if you wanted to remove some pieces. in some games, the randomization feature is nice, but because of the near infinite number of combinations of jewlery parts in the shipbuilder, it would eat up system resources and probably cause a CTD.

Useful, but ugly. Defines my ships. Have only been playing a little over a week now I am concentrating on startegies and learning before going into ship design.

My functional (but ugly) ships are designed on the race I am going to attack. Weapon strength vs their weakness, defence vs their main weapon. They have an engine, or two. Weapons and defenses. Sometimes sensors/etc. Then they thrown into battle.

A "design with these bits" button would save a minute or two at most. But benefit those learning or cannot be bothered to design masterpiece ships.