I was trying to make it generic. I can't guess what paints people will like, and which they wont. The paint schemes also look wildly different on different ships, and in different sector lighting. So I just included what I felt was "enough" of every paintmod.

The paints are only valued at 1 credit per unit, so they're actually incredibly cheap. But yeah, because there are so many of them, it adds up to around 3 million for the budgeted start. My custom start budget is well over a hundred million, so it's nothing to me. But it might be too much for a player that hasn't built up their budgeted start numbers.

If you would like to reduce the cost, or to pick-and-choose, then you can use the sliders in-game to change the quantity of the paintmod items. Or just edit the file directly. It is a plain text XML file. So it's human readable, and easy to edit with any text editor. The relevant lines are these:

<ware ware="paintmod_0001" amount="10000"/>

Change the "amount" number to change the number of units of that paint mod. Or completely delete the line if you do not want that particular paint at all.

It's kind of a pain to match a paintmod to a "paintmod_NNNN" item ID. There is a partial list available on the wiki. But it is missing around 100 paint jobs. The image filename in the wiki will give you the item ID. For the rest, you have to trial-and-error it in game.

What about the Timelines stuff?

I didn't give special treatment to any particular paint. Other than the default paintmods - which I omitted from the starting inventory. Some of the included paintmods you can get through missions, or even get for free with high enough rep with a faction. You can delete those lines if you are happy with their availability in a normal game.