My 2 cents: easy to understand and remember strong/weak or bonus/penalty mechanisms are very desirable from a strategic point of view - allows players to learn simple general rules that allows him/her to quickly theorise whether x would be effective against y. Consistent and clear rules are elegant. The old system of individually tweaked strong/weak figures seemed to be very cluttered - complexity for the sake of complexity.
So that's why I'm hoping that the number of hull classes will be reduced further, and hoping that the strong/weak system can be distilled into a fairly elegant table of x type of weaponry is strong against y type of hull. It gives the thinking player a chance to work out the outcome of a fight using simple, clear and well-defined rules.
That's fine, and that's why I did simplify it some, but really it just can't get any smaller. The simplicity you are looking for comes from the fact that we generally limit the number of types of ships (and thus hull types) to a pretty limited number in any given encounter. Remember, not all ship types are even in every campaign, let alone in every battle -- and that's very much by design, a core tenet of the game, and never going to change.
I was originally against hull types because I felt like they would be over-simplifying the game, but now they're a happy middle ground, I feel like. Having too many more than this would be overkill, but having any fewer than this would make them indistinct. As it is, I think the current number is just about perfect (and not at all arbitrary), unless we introduce some wildly different types of ships (which I'd like to do in future expansions, hence my feeling that this will grow by a couple over time).
Anyway, I'm not here to debate, but that's where I'm coming from, anyway.
And now, a new version with all that stuff in it:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,7326.0.html
