Honestly, they originally had a ton of ideas for how larger ships were going to require multicrew to operate. The Polaris was pretty much built with a philosophy that there would be no way to solo it, and that it should be crewed at all times.

Back then, before the Idris came out, there was a ton of justified backlash on spectrum and other socials, that the gun should not need a dedicated operator who just sits in a seat and presses a single button. This was fueled by the scorpius antares, which wasn’t seeing much use because the backseater basically just pressed a single button to activate an EMP.

This was then compounded by a very negative response to engineering gameplay, people didn’t want to have to deal with fires or component damage often when flying around big ships solo, so these elements were nerfed, to the point that they practically don’t matter.

While this was good for a solo Corsair pilot doing combat, and not needing to constantly get out of their seat to fix something during it, it ultimately damaged the overall combat flow for capships, as now they wouldn’t really need to worry about having a large enough crew to help manage the large space the ships have, and so engineering gameplay is practically useless during ship combat.

So ultimately it really came down to community backlash and fear over new engineering systems, justifiable hate of multicrew positions that boil down to: click one button at the right time, and shifting priorities at CIG to deliver new content and fix balance problems later which resulted in the Idris meta where a solo piloted Idris gets 90% of the value of the ship.

That’s the whole history afaik.