Things we'd like to see in the next patch

[Suicide Junkie]

Yes, I have.

At worst, the system randomly picks a hitpoint on the ship and then figures out what component it belongs to. (so a 20 hitpoint engine is twice as likely to be hit than a 10 hitpoint Bridge)

However, it does even better than that.

I did some simulations while balancing the B5 armor;
Two otherwise identical ships... both have the same tonnage devoted to weapons, engines and C&C. The remaining space on design A was all heavy armor and design B had all Light armor.

The light armor had 50% more hitpoints than the light armor. (6000, vs 4000), but the heavy armor came in 8kt components instead of 1kt components. Thus, the heavy armor have 5 times more hitpoints per component.

In actual combat, the Heavy ships won 2 out of three times!
With auto tactical, this was shown to be a result of the heavy armor blocking a greater % of the shots from the enemy weapons. The light armor ships would get hit, and suffer damage to weapons much more often than the heavy armored ones would.
Occasionally, the light armor ship would get lucky, and not lose a weapon until late in the battle. By that time, the heavy armored ship was nearly out of armor, while the light ship still had 2000 hitpoints left.