There is no reason why some rehash of the old system would have the same excessive limitations. I also agree it would be exceptionally difficult to create a system that guarantees navigable geometry that also enables the fairly creative environments with varying directions of gravity.
Currently there is no correlation between the collider vertices and what you see visually, and furthermore there is no limitation on importing models with for instance a bunch of polygons jutting into the halls and obscuring your view. You could for instance have a path through the polygon clusterfuck that you have memorized which isn't obvious from inspecting the design due to the sheer amount of noise introduced by the designer. Then you just carry the crew to their stations and the ship runs fine while being pretty much impassible to anyone but the designer.
You could also put invisible pit traps into ships with jagged overlapping colliders at the bottom that would be impossible to escape from.
Not to mention I have seen some extremely high-polygon designs that probably would not render well on older machines. I don't know off the top of my head if there is an upper limit but there probably should be. By all appearances it would currently be perfectly possible to create deliberately laggy environments, though that could be resolved by simply putting upper limits on the amount of detail you could add, rather than forcing the player to create a simpler interior for someone to render (using a drawing system rather than full 3d rendering).
There is also no obligation to actually add ai pathing, so you are left in a scenario where AI helping you board is outright impossible, and player boarding would be extremely difficult and unpleasant.
Currently there is no correlation between the collider vertices and what you see visually, and furthermore there is no limitation on importing models with for instance a bunch of polygons jutting into the halls and obscuring your view. You could for instance have a path through the polygon clusterfuck that you have memorized which isn't obvious from inspecting the design due to the sheer amount of noise introduced by the designer. Then you just carry the crew to their stations and the ship runs fine while being pretty much impassible to anyone but the designer.
You could also put invisible pit traps into ships with jagged overlapping colliders at the bottom that would be impossible to escape from.
Not to mention I have seen some extremely high-polygon designs that probably would not render well on older machines. I don't know off the top of my head if there is an upper limit but there probably should be. By all appearances it would currently be perfectly possible to create deliberately laggy environments, though that could be resolved by simply putting upper limits on the amount of detail you could add, rather than forcing the player to create a simpler interior for someone to render (using a drawing system rather than full 3d rendering).
There is also no obligation to actually add ai pathing, so you are left in a scenario where AI helping you board is outright impossible, and player boarding would be extremely difficult and unpleasant.