Outch, welcome to the group of people who feel 'helpless' once they begin to design some ships in that interface and its built-in processes.

One thing i've learned from experiencing through a LOT of pre-fleet tryouts for my mod is that the activity is somewhat tougher than it seems. Mind you, i consider myself a fairly good 3D modeler since most common issues with regular dedicated 3D softwares aren't secret to me anymore because i worked a lot at it over the years. Nurbs, splines and texturing by UV mapping were essential knowledge to both have and master if one needed to MAKE his stuff - and that is, properly & efficiently. Patience is key here.

But, GC is a game and it uses a local interface & procedures made for it... only. Good enough for ingame functions once you get the hang of it. My advice would be to experiment a lot with options and scalings. Just the sliders and coordinate arrows are VERY useful if you also remember to adjust zoomings at the hard-points. 3D is a concept which isn't exactly user-friendly by nature - even with superb (and costly) tools (such as 3dStudioMax, etc!). Turning off background stars/nebulaes may also helpout, somehow.

I'd evaluate that 85% of the solution stands on one thing alone - progressively acquiring necessary skills in reasonable (by your definition) time.

Thus, the shipyard and YOUR needs (and how you prefer the activity to be - easy or fast, tedious or slow) require plenty of patience.
It took me quite awhile before i managed to put in some good results. I guess anyone else should expect that much too; unless they have the magic eye of perfection which is rare like true talent, btw.

(PS: Sure you know about this but -- the Camera controls can be found on the boxy thingy with a sort of triangular "director" along the usual Front_Side_Perspective, speed and HP/toggles, etc)

- Zyxspilon.

Oh, it's a very simple 'thought'.

If you are at the standard zoom level the whole time and only trying to pin-point at a specific location where many hard-points are bunched together - it becomes VERY hard to attach anything anywhere. By slowly step-zooming(s) onto the exact spot... the targeted Hard-point is much easier to reach while your currently cursor-attached component may look a lot bigger. Small annoyance compared to the "hovering" shifts that inevitably occur when the model is too far and deep. Precision is intuitive in most cases, since the code does (at times) create an automatic frozen area near what it thinks might be the intended hard-point - logic dictates here, not YOUR reasoning (how could an algorithm determine our intentions anyway?!). Such a focus function is quite hard to control unless the zooms are somehow higher and in rare occasions, at a necessary maximum.

- Zyxpsilon.