Can we move away from ships like the Eclipse and the Razor that are focused on one single task and return to player-side modularity?
TL;DRThey haven't deliberately abandoned modular ships, since single-role ships are needed and come in waves, and they're wary of promising more while the player-facing modular system isn't in the game.
I wouldn't say we've intentionally moved away from it. To create the whole breadth of ships that we need for the universe, there has to be some that have a sole focus. We did a huge push on modular ships early on, and they come in waves. We'll do a load of specific career-focused ones, specific role-focused ones, then we'll do a couple of modular ones. It's not been a general order to move away from those things. It's just we needed those specific ones.
And of course, from my side of things, from the marketing, the promotion and stuff like that, the player-facing modular system isn't in-game, and you always want to be careful how many things you promise. We've committed to a number of things using the player modular system. The Endeavor, for instance, lives and breathes by it. The Retaliator utilizes it. The Vanguards essentially use the player modularity system. So it's one of those things where it's prudent on our end, when we ask for things, to let that player-facing modularity system develop a bit more before we start making the requests from our end: hey, can we do this, can we do that. I just think it's the responsible thing to do on our end.
There are also things that can do lots of things. They're desirable for a small set of people that really love the ability to do everything. But as a wider concept, they lack a focus naturally because they're multi-role. So it's very hard to get excited about something that can do lots of things mediocrely rather than one thing that can do it really well.
The worst marketing tagline in the world would be "jack of all trades and master of none". Nobody wants to be told their ship isn't really good at anything because we made it too broad.