Been reading the feedback from players before fdev commit to what's going live, it's apparent most of these are from pvp combatants as they are pro smaller shields, some maintaining armor tanking as a viable alternative, my experience of hull tanking has been one of little success, I've been over 80% hull and had my canopy blown out with a vulture that had military hull and all free slots filled with hull reinforcement modules - once those shields went, the vulture is one squishy bird.
Not everyone in the game flies something that can hold its own with shields down, nor has the money to throw away on rebuys, so whilst this is situational, yeah combat pilots go for a specific ship, what about the ones flying in open that are still working there way up in the likes of the vulture, why disadvantage these pilots to save the few who can really fly blindfolded whilst letting a hail of fixed weapons loose on their opponent and have a huge credit balance.. a mechanic change is always daunting, but, this specifically in my opinion is only going to hurt the less wealthy, the less able and scare people out of open even more but still be a nerf when they hide in solo mode or a private group because their once capable shielded bird is now needing a raft of engineer mods to be comparable to what it was before
Also... The question regarding pvp or solo can easily be rigged using a generic form, it's easy for me to say I only fly pve whilst I have skills surpassing the Red Baron in pvp - why not upload the journal and let fdev see who of these "pve" players actually spend most of their logged in time in open, I bet there's some slight exaggerations going on
Maybe the age old problem of a dedicated pvp mode and a dedicated pve mode is the only way of actually keeping the masses happy, where flying in pvp, you need to tailor your ship accordingly or face being blown up relatively easy as those shield booster stacks once in open get diminishing returns applied to them, but when in solo, they are normal...