Despite the introduction of the HUD gauges and Yarn's HUD scaling and resolution fix, there are shortcomings - one that prevents us from changing the HUD visuals to be completely different from FreeSpace, and what modern computer and video games (this year) did.
What is needed is several additions and fixes, and that means opening up new possibilities for HUD designers, while getting rid of the hard-coded limitations that hobbed modders for years.
The answer is pretty obvious: the HUD targeting brackets. Corners of the targeting brackets have been unchanged since 1998. Under my suggestion, targeting bracket corners can be changed and/or have vertex/geometry/fragment shaders applied to not only them, but also other HUD gauges as well. The numbers of the targeting bracket corners can be changed arbitrarily, for example, 5 to 8, or 2 to 3, instead of only 4.