I admit, like many I had a knee-jerk reaction to the OP after reading it, but, I took some time to re-read it and talk about it with a trusted gamer friend. That being said, as a almost always solo PvE player, I do not like this idea for a few reasons:
1) Part of the claim is that power systems are hard to build.
Now, I may have been blessed or maybe I'm insane, who knows, but I have never found building a power system on a ship or station hard, for me, doing so is easy, things like shipyards, cargo and turrets are more of a challenge, but that if because I favor Star Trek styled designs. You talk of lack of complexity to building power systems, well I rather like how uncompleted it is. Games like Space Engineers, which have more complex power systems are not nearly as fun for me to play on, because every part of the ship needs so much micro-management that I can't enjoy flying it.
2)Try and stop people from building "Death Cubes".
Now, I've been playing StarMade from about 3 months before the cargo update till now, and in that time I've seen 3 "death cube" ships, all of them were mining ships............ I've played on several servers and have never ran across a cube/wedge/brick shaped ship that was a combat ship, so really, I read about stopping "death cubes" and I wonder, where are you seeing these?
3)Design choice limitation due supposedly making a ship weak by placing a interior.
You hit that nail of the head there and while I've seen this brought up before, in all 15 pages of comments I read, I will, but in a different light I hope. Like many players, I do not do RP interiors, I don't, I've never liked RP in ANY game I've played, from WoW to Star Trek Online to Runes of Magic to DCUO to RIFT, you name it I might have played it. In all this time, I've disliked the idea of RP, refused to even do it, because that's not why I play the game, I didn't play a paladin in WoW to pretend to be some noble knight that rescues a fair prince and lives happily ever after. I played because the paladin at the time was one of the classes whose play style was liked by me, I'm a Tactical Captain In STO because I liked the idea of the extra damage abilities they got, not because I imagine myself a member of star-fleet.
Every ship I've ever build had a small interior if it was large enough to have one, mostly, the interior was about function over form: a teleporter to go between ship and station or ship to ship with, room for the ship core so I can get in and out with ease, a Storage box if the ship is meant to have cargo of any size, things of that nature. I don't need or use a cafeteria, restrooms, "sleeping" quarters, false bridges that are only for looks or other useless to me design choices like that, because I don't RP that this ship is anything more then a collection of blocks I've slapped together to play with. If someone want's to build such a RP interior in there ship in place of systems blocks, go ahead, do so if it what your want to do and how you like to build , I have ZERO care if you do. Beware tho, if you tangle with me, because my ship may look on the outside like the USS Defiant, but I have more shields and bigger guns and can out fly your so called battle-cruiser.
With what was posted about heat influence areas and making systems preform less efficiently while in them and create extra heat, I can't help but feel like your saying make your ships either have large empty spaces that are wasted or have RP interior, I really can't see anything else.
The ships I build, Star Trek style they may be, but if I build a ship based on the Sovereign-class USS Enterprise Ncc-1701 E the ship is not gonna be 1:1 scale, it's gonna be a handmade ship that is more like 1/3 scale and has a hidden door that leads right into the small, sometimes cramped interior that is all a single player like me needs.
4) Too many blocks involved and focus on regeneration.
As far as too many blocks, I really can't see it, but than again, with never having problems with power systems, maybe I don't see it. The supposed focus on regeneration for me only comes when attempting to build recon or stealth craft. Not a single fighter, corvette, frigate, cruiser or larger ship I've built have every had a massive focus on regen, every one has always ever had enough to make sure I could run ion passive, power shields, fire weapons, use my engines and charge my jump drive as needed, sometime at the same time. A frigate with powerful rapid fire cannons will have a regen that allows me to fire them with out stopping, while a large cruiser will need time to charge between it's large missiles that are it's main weapons while it's beam turrets keep constant fire on enemy ships. A miner will need only enough regen to power it's jump-drive and scanner since salvage beams take so little.
In all fairness, I am ready and willing to revise my opinion on this proposal if given more facts, more information on how this will impact ship design, more of a concrete idea of what the new system will be, more information on how it will tie into changes in weapons and shields and other systems. Ultimately , I really need to see the whole picture before I'd even feel comfortable saying yes to this proposal, there is just too much still in the air and unknown to say yes.