A noobs thoughts on ship component balancing

I am not an experienced player but I see that right now the dev are remodelling weight of components, so this might be the best time to share my impression of the modules so far.

The main problem I have is that I don't use the middle tier components at all. And I think that is sad. I think the main problem is that the refund you get for components to low and the access to high level components is to easy.

First, the refund problem: It discourages slowly upgrading you gear. You either choose the lvl 1 option because its good and cheap or the one with best stats. Opting for a middle-class component is, as far as my understanding goes, not very good, because it is so much wasted money once you upgrade it again. The most extreme example is the bridge. Yes, the buffs a bridge gives is very much worth its several hundred thousand credits, but upgrading it is so expensive because you get almost nothing for your default bridge and the difference between bridges isn't that huge.

But, the main problem might be that high level components are so damn easy to get. Sure you need some amount of military and starports on the planet, but you just need one planet to fulfil that requirement and you are good to go. I think it would be better to have the top tier of any component type be faction specific. It would encourage a more political approaches. And I would like, that even generic components are tied to the faction rank. It would add another long term motivation to the game, to finally unlock the latest tech.

Third, mass dampener. What are these things? What is the lore behind them? And why do we need them? I think the main problem for me aren't the mass dampener, but the mass mechanic in general and how it is used. Mass isn't something that I consider when building a ship. I consider what range my weapons should have, how much storage I need, if I need medical facilities or if I need extra fleeing power. But not mass, because mass is very unintuitive implemented. Why do officer quarters weight so much less then a weapons locker? I don't know. Maybe someone can shed a bit of light onto why weight is a mechanic that we need. The only reason I can think if is to use weight to convert a slot to a different slot size. But why have components of the same slot size not the same weight? You could use weight to make a component that basically needs two slots. One for itself and one for the dampener. That would be only useful for components that can't be split. And these are right now only guns.

My last point ties a bit into my confusion with mass. I would like to change more than one component to see if everything fits, before I pay for them.