Thanks for the explanation, Geo.
I'm not necessarily against this sort of play...which is the reason I suggested an alternative: nothing below average. However, I feel it's a bit, hmmmmm, hypocritcal (kind of a rough word but I couldn't think another one) to readily accept ship design a trait of a good player yet, seemingly, declare empire design ability as something that gives an unfair advantage. I just think that both those traits/abilities contribute to determining a good player. If people want to use vanila empires (perhaps because they wonder sometimes if someone's empire design played an important role in beating them), then why not also require ship designs to be vanila...everyone use a standard set of predetermined ship designs? I don't see much difference (except for the logistics of defining ship designs to use for all the different tech levels...but you, hopefully, get my drift).