Yeah. Like. I play with maintenance off because it's a pain to actively micromanage, but I still build ships, rotate them, and distribute infrastructure as if it were on.
Sorta wish there was a way to restrict NPR teching. I want to play a low-tech game with strict research limits (say, a civ cap of 100 project RP per decade per category but unlimited research for ship components, and an overall researched tech base cap at ~TL3, i.e. around Ion drive and equivalent for the main-line techs like drives, missile damage, the construction tech rates, &c., but unlimited for the ancillary techs like power bonuses, launcher/laser size reduction, &c.
Start with conventional tech, have it take centuries to get to the normal tech cap, and after that the only way to advance farther is to manage to salvage/capture Precursor and Invader ships and reverse-engineer their components. If you get far enough, you'll hit their tech, but that's the ultimate hard cap. Basically remove that exponential scaling effectiveness where past a certain point almost all research and construction is near-instant and your tech is well beyond everything else. Make every pocket of Precursor activity a serious threat at any point in the game. Get into fights with 1000% difficulty NPRs where it's superior tactics and strategic positioning that win rather than high tech. Have everything stay at that low-ish TL where there's still a strong sense of adventure and danger in sending ships off into the void. Have navies that have to be composed of a bunch of low-tech ships in order to increase effectiveness because you can't increase efficiency beyond a certain point.
Give it more of a Freespace/Battletech feel, I guess you could say.