Stock ships better than ones you can build

Actually the http://forums.impulsedriven.com/323756 article that you reference is the same article as https://forums.galciv2.com/323756.

That is because the Impulse driven forum "Home > My Games > GalCiv II > Twilight of the Arnor" is actually http://forums.impulsedriven.com/forum/483 which is the same identical forum as the GalCiv2 forum "Home > GalCiv II > Twilight of the Arnor" or https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/483.

Also the GalCiv II forum in each path is identical, in one case referenced as http://forums.impulsedriven.com/forum/162 and in the other case referenced as https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/162.

Note that this is how all forums that exist in multiple sites work, however this only works for forums that exist on both sites. For example the "Home > GalCiv II > Metaverse" forum or https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/345 does *not* have a corresponding counterpart on the Impulse driven. That is http://forums.impulsedriven.com/forum/345 does not exist in reality. If you click on the forum link for a forum that doesn't exist you might end up in some kind of inter-forum limbo that isn't related to any obvious place in the site in question. In other cases you simply get a 404 page unavailable error.

However while you can't see forums from one site that aren't implemented in another it does seem that you can always see any article at any site even if that particular site doesn't happen to implement the forum that contains the article. Caveat Emptor, I by no means have exhaustively checked this out but so far it seems to be true.

For example going back to the Metaverse forum which is a subforum of the GalCiv II forum (i.e. /forum/345) and is present on forums.galciv2.com but not on forums.impulsedriven.com. However https://forums.galciv2.com/154389 which is Article 154389 which exists in the GalCiv II > Metaverse (i.e. /forum/345) forum also is accessible from forums.impulsedriven.com as http://forums.impulsedriven.com/154389 even though you could never actually find it listed anywhere on Impulsedriven.

Not sure what real benefit any of this provides other than a glimpse of how the underlying structure of these inter-related websites work.

Well the stock ships aren't like they were in DA.  Now the "stock ships" are actually made based off of what weapons/defense/hulls you have available and what you choose for it to focus on.  It unfortunatly (or fortunatly?) doesn't look at your miniturization tech and just assumes you have full techs or something along those lines.  I beleive they said that the AI uses the same thing to make it's ships, so at least you are on the same page as them when it comes to the power of ships.

Doesn't it kind of make designing your own ships pointless, since they'll never be anywhere near as good as the one the game gives you?  At least until very late in the game when you actually have all the mini tech?

Not if you want to make specialized ships.  The AI can only make general combat ships for you.

Particularly in the early stages it does make ship design worse than useless. It's not quite so obvious once you accumulate more miniturization techs, and want more specialised ships, but even so it is a major bug that needs a fix. Yes the AI uses the same designs, but that's half the problem - either you don't design your own ships, or you give the AI a major miniturization bonus on top of what it's supposed to have on the difficultly level. Yes a human player can make better use of specialised ships in the later stages, but it still spoils ship design to know the crude defaults are better than anything it is even possible to design.