SE4 Advanced brainstorming

[Suicide Junkie]

Gritecon style hulls are a good alternative.

Use maintenance reduction abilities and component scale mounts to make the average ship cost (ie build time) be proportional to size squared.
The average ship maintenance cost can at the same time be proportional to the square root of the size.

Then you can give all the ship hulls right from the beginning, and they'll get used.