Under a coding point of view this kind of change isn't important because the MVPs don't need it.
I wonder if the mod devs willing to get a build with a boosted limit are really going to use it. I suspect people tend to fill ships.tbl and switch to Inferno builds even if they're not needed.
Let's be honest - how can you use 130 different ship classes in a campaign? How many species are you going to use?
Oh, you can fill it up REAL quick, trust me.
Why do you think I've divided the next Chapter of FOW into two sub-chapters.
Granted, there's a LOT of work for once chapter, but partially because there's no way in hell I could fit all ship in there. I'm scratching the limit already and I had to remove almost all shivan ships. And it's still not enough. I had to axe a few ships that would normally be in. I had to axe a few easter eggs because of the limit too.
And for DOTA I'll have the use a INF build, because it contains all of the ships from COTS + a whole load more.
Let's be honest, there's a whole lot of good ships out there these days and the current limit just doesn't cut it anymore.