coloring — and maybe having certain crafted components show up.

Yeah, I think that's about the limit of what's reasonable to hope for. Again, I don't think it's likely, but I wouldn't be totally shocked.

But I keep thinking about how the fact that all this stuff is founded on procedural generation probably makes it a lot more complicated than people think when viewing it from the concept of how 'traditionally' engineered games. The parts that compose the ships don't seem to be subject to the same sort morphing/translation as creatures, so it wouldn't be crazy difficult, but I think, assuming they didn't build the ship generation code in the first place with colour switching and optional parts, even that would be a lot of work.

But, it's been a year, and we know these folks can smash out a lot of work very quickly. I'd say if they thought it was an important thing to maximise players enjoyment of the game in the immediate future, and they don't consider it at odds with the 'vision' they have (and that they believe their most faithful fans have) of NMS, it will happen in NEXT. The first condition is very possible, but I kinda think the second is not; and I think it needs both.

So uh, that's my reasoning for thinking that uh, we are less likely to be able to change colour schemes for ships or see upgrades as external changes to them in the next update for NMS than you might think. Jesus why am I so obsessed with this game...