There's a difference between item variety and ship variety. Right now we have ship variety (maybe not enough, but that's another discussion). Sound's last post would change the ship variety that we have into item variety. Yes, there would be a lot of items, but each player would have pretty much the same ship. We used to have a item system like that, where each "item" was a single stat, like Thrust or Recharge. The problem was balance. It's very difficult to make a single point of energy worth the same as a single point of rotation (or a single decoy worth the same as a single repel). That's why we have our current item system: so we can bundle upgrades together to make them balanced.