Re: sector space, that's understandable, I guess. Still annoying. When I go shopping for ship weapons on the exchange or pull them out of the bank I want to be able to see their actual stats! I think I didn't communicate properly what's going on with the scaling equipment, which is two different issues. The equipment…
It makes sense to me that stats would display differently between ground vs. space, for the reason you mention, but not that they would display differently between being in a system and being in sector space. And it definitely doesn't make sense that a scaling item would start displaying worse stats when you equip it.
I'd imagine one of the big factors is the question of "what sets up the story they want to tell/justifies the gameplay they want to provide?" The Kobali for instance have their whole "resurrected corpses" thing that's weird and off-putting to the other Delta Quadrant species, but they're mostly not really evil or anything…
You know, I'm traditionally a console gamer. I've always held a dim view of PC gaming. My perception was that it was all about games that were great assuming you could actually get them to work, which you usually couldn't because nobody in the industry thought "will this run on a computer other than the ones in our…