What I was thinking was that the given FREDer picks up a mission with several generally-named ships, the player set up, a generic background, a few easily-edited generic objectives, and basic story structure 'defend convoy from NTF', 'conduct a three-mission long assualt on a Shivan depot', whatever. Basically, the menial stuff one needs to construct a mission, so as to allow the FREDer to get right into creating their art, adding and subtracting [but not exactly annihilating the core concept of the template], rather than ****ing around for an hour or two arranging all the essentials before you can really start.
Although, a mere idea of a mission/campaign story, kept sufficiently generic, could potentially be far more efficient, allowing for far more latitude in artistic creation. Of course, the downside to that being you put off our less experienced FREDers in forcing them to start from scratch, which is always a daunting challenge.
In any case, I based the idea off essentially Mr. Squiggle, if you get my meaning. You pick up something generic, and use it to create something unique, of which your single line of dialogue idea is an excellent example.
