The meta was never spaghetti. Only a few ever appeared on public servers, and when polled no server admin said they had ever seen their server have more than a couple spaghetti ships appear for a brief period.
You say badly built ships should blow up when hit. That already was a thing. The community wailed for a year about how that was ruining the game and finally got it removed. As predicted, now we are right back to this, which sort of complaint is why Schema gave us integrity in the fist place...
If he implemented ships instantly blowing up if hit in an unarmored location, the players would rend their clothes and gnash their teeth yet again because "the exposed tip of my beam is now an achilles heel that kills my whole ship."
If just having "some" armor on a ship prevented explosion when systems were hit (which makes zero sense, but assuming), minmax players would simply put the minimum amount of armor blocks on, and regardless of the ratio half would complain "not enough armor required, head up ass!" And the other half would cry "too much armor required, game ruined!"
That aside, how would taking away player freedom by forcing armor prevent noob-cubes?
Easy enough to armor a cube.
Not anywhere close to where i was coming from. your assumptions are cute, unreasonable and somewhat rude.
1. assumption: "he would implement ships instantly blowing up if hit in an unarmored location," really?
2. assumption: i have a problem with cube ships. NO. cube ships are fine. and why say its a nood-cubes. those cube ships are OP af.
3. assumption: im done. i didnt use enough words to get any idea across. but making assumptions and putting words in my mouth is rude.
But let me just go over what i was actually thinking about.
right now in the game minimax players dont use hull cause it serves little to no purpose. in fact. it makes their ship cost more and slows them down. So why use it at all. and i see their point .. weapons either have too high dps or hull need way more hp not sure what they could there, so im gonna move past that. Cause after 10-esh years of Alpha with rebalances, they still dont have it balanced
but let me give a example :
"i have a well made ship that looks nice, has many turrets, has 5-8 thick adv-hull, 5mil shields , rest of ship is filled with basic hull for more armor and so on. A minimax player with a ship that is about the same size of my ship, with no hull, far less mass, you know just a big cube with beam sticks and a few missiles on it. showed up and took down my 5mil shields and blew large holes in my ship's hull in a few secs. so i just jumped away cause i couldnt believe how dumb that was."
hull is very costly, but for pvp, you dont want it at all. and forcing minimax players to have to atleast add it to their ships would atleast bring them to the same playing field. even if its just large cube. still it works. and what do i mean by this.? they would have the same cost/loses chances as others. everything else in the game is fairly easy to get or really easy, where building up hull takes alot. making the hull cheaper wouldnt do anything on its own cause minimax players still wouldnt use it. hull is too weak with to many negatives . but what you could do is make it where largers ships have to have atleast some sort hull. im not sure how they would do it. there is so many ways to choose and i dont know witch would work best for thier vision.
But beside all that. it just makes sense, how many sifi ships do you see with no hull? none right. How about ships in RL? again NONE.
most anything in space need hull. A prob, ship or station wouldnt last without it.