The current game is a competition of how many engine pods you can put together into a ship and it is really no fun. It makes armor a detriment and makes only one type of ship viable (ultralight walls) and gives little room for countering or variance. I've broken the problem into two parts.
Shot Speed
The reason thrust is the whole game right now is because ships are going so fast that combat with large amounts of thrust is all about going faster than the other person so you can go faster than their shots. At such thrust ratios, small cannons easily out-range rails which flips the entire game's balance upside down. Shot speeds are set for slow moving gameplay at 1x speed and not for what the game has turned into (ships with 90% of their budget spent on thrust dancing around each other for ages until one flies out of the RoD).
Solution?
My guess is to just about double shot speed or even more. bringing shots back to a level of being something you can't just back away from would be a nice. Hopefully this would make a certain amount of thrust a waste. Maybe there are other ways of making shots not be so avoidable.
Engine Rooms
I get the idea for engine rooms is that they allow you to make more out of a thrust surface and maybe with some revision it could work like that. Unfortunately it just creates a situation where if you aren't laying thrust out with 6x Huge engines around a single engine room, you're wasting money. It limits building choices and is one of the biggest changes to how ships are structured. Without engine rooms thrust could be structured in a number of ways with many options.
Anyways I'm just looking for something to kill the meta and I don't know if mines are going to do it.