This reminds me that I wish they'd put a "Hide obsolete components" button in the shipyard.
If I have Plasma III or whatever, there's no reason to still list Plasma II, Plasma I, Laser V, Laser IV, Laser III, and all the other crap I'll never use again. Having them there isn't just useless, it's annoying to have to scroll past all of it to see what Mass Drivers or Missiles I have, too. Granted, MOO2 had this problem, too, but it wasn't as bad because that game didn't make you research several different versions of every weapon.
Yeah, my bad for making that comparison, but I can barely help it - after all this patching, the whole "Nah, you can't have Plasma yet, you need four more (slightly smaller) Lasers!" approach to weapon tech is one of the very few aspects of GalCiv2 that actively annoys me. Oh, well, at least I can trade-rape the AI civs by selling off the obsolete weapon techs one level at a time...