How do you balance ships, so that a ship players fall in love with can't do everything? How do you resist the urge to just make every single ship the best ship it could be?

The gate checks that we have at the concept phase, that is exactly what that is for. Every discipline will get involved and say, I don't like it this way, this will do this, this will do this. That'll be our feedback to go away, reiterate on it, come back, show them again, and then maybe they'll be happy. Then we do balance again for stats, and that's during the flight prep phase.