In my experience, a popular game always has a few fans who like to mod things. If LT gets there (hopefully), such an export/import would allow those fans to share their work with others. This way, LT could actually get some handcrafted assets even if they were never planned to be delivered .
I can't remember where I saw it but I believe Josh said that he won't have mod support, at least not in the first release, because with the PCG setup of the game it can be hard to implement, which is why literally everything in the game is PCG without and custom created items that I know of. I may be wrong but I believe that is the case, if anyone has information otherwise though?...
I would rather see ships built from 2-3 generic materials.
Varied enough to make the player harvest different stuff for radically different ship designs or race components but generic enough for not turning into micromanagement hell.
In my opinion that is incredibly boring. Kinda kills the game a bit for the miners/traders if we have 2-3 materials used to build entire ships. I know we are ditching realism in a big way but that's just mindnumbingly basic. I agree you might not want to hunt around all over the galaxy to build a ship, but that's just warcraft 1 levels of basic, wood and gold, maybe pop cap kind of dynamic. In a game that many people might play for well over a hundred hours on an individual save to build up their fleet and faction and empire, a mere 2 or 3 items to develop your fleet, easily found in every system, is going to kill the game for people who don't want combat as much as trading and mining.
Maybe Josh can put in a pre-game economy setting that simplifies it a ton for people who just want to shoot things or what not, but I want a ton of items, different materials with different strengths and weaknesses, different ammunition types, even different materials for weapons, perhaps something that amplifies energy weapon damage but overheats faster or something. Maybe better targeting computers and reloading systems so your ship can aim more rapidly and missiles reload faster with an autoreloader.
Some of these things should be hard to find or expensive to manufacture because they do provide an advantage, but just sacrificing all that depth, interest and customisation just sounds like it'll get boring quick. Looking at how intriguing the new RTS feature that Josh has implemented, plus the fleet formation and tactics setup he's making and the awesome ship builder mechanic, it would be really disappointing if the other critical aspects of the game were really simple and, well, boring.