True, but then what does it matter ?
A slightly higher damage cap, a lower damage cap. You get killed regardless, if someone is determined enough.

At higher rank, the cap is king. Your base ship stats will make stats given by modules only a fraction - making the smaller modules near worthless. All those little mods end up totalling thousands of decks, and they seem to provide good benefits. But the same defense is twice effective with half the decks. So if I get 30k defense with a 2k deck build, and I go up against someone with 35K defense and 6k decks, I would take much less damage per shot. So if his various extra mods gave him a few thousand hull more (by this point a good portion would be just brackets), it would still be harder and more energy intensive to kill me. Why spend 3x the normal badge energy on someone when you could tap them and kill 3 other people? Yeah, determined players will keep going, but it would cut down on players tackling you. The damage cap also applies to NPCs and attacking players, therein cutting repair costs and how often you need to do so when doing those activities.

Long story short: eventually base ship stats give you way more stats than modules (look at Mento's 120k attack when buffed), so having extra decks with bad ratio modules (and given enough time, any modules not fit in a (rank+19)=decks build) does nothing but make your ship weaker in the long run.

Please excuse grammar and spelling mistakes, my phone likes changing letters to other letters at random due to "suggestions" (including changing letters to nearby alphabetical letters) popping up in the MIDDLE OF THE DAMN KEYBOARD. I also try to delete in one area and it deletes somewhere else entirely.

Heck, my base shields are only [Data Expunged], but all ready let me see how worthless non-percent shield mods are.

Agree everything you say is true, but Attack, Scan and maybe hull is particularly hard to increase because the tech tree are too short or too expensive.

Because of this, many players turn to secondary weapons such as Auto-Lasers and Mind Controllers etc, they're small, can be installed incrementally.

Personally, in my opinion, it is best that you increase attack power possible in whatever way possible; Modules, tactical officer etc -

Recruiting Tactical Officers is slow and arduous, how many rescued prisoners do you get per day? how many rescued prisoners does everyone get per day ? and how many prisoners do you get each time you rank ?

We must keep in mind that not everyone has the time, money or luck to build big, powerful ships and have massive 10-20K Artifact/Hour and pull in dozens of Prisoners, So some players who hardly get prisoners find it more beneficial to add 8 decks for a Lazuli mind controller rather than 17 rank points into tactical officers. And because of this, players don't consider that they one day, the majority of their strengths come from Helmsmen and Tactical Officers.

I was like that when i was smaller, shortages on rank points, i look at the Tactical Officers and scoffed at its inefficiency, Add more decks enough for 8x def mod, 8x guns, 5x hull and all the miscellaneous, efficient NPC mods ( not mission Mods ) that would increase energy, attack and defense. It appealed to me that Rank Point : Attack Power ratio was better and thought it would outweigh the repercussions of the damage cap.

I had stopped decking at around 2050 decks when i finally put on my 8th def mod, ship bots had pushed the rest of the way, i think i still need room for Continuum Parsers, Force Voiders and Dark Phase Engines. At the end of the day, i can't "deduct" decks, they're there and might as well make the most of it.

If you play long enough, you will get to the point where you have tens of thousands of AP production per hour. Unless you're trying to be bad, or a scan multi, it's basically inevitable and will be reached at some point.

Not to mention that having a ton of AP/h doesn't even guarantee that you'll get prisoners.