Having just beat the game (again, but newly for v.99c) both straight and modded, I really don't feel doing it all over again anytime soon. What about a 'QuickPlay' or 'Survival Play' option that let's you pick your starting ship like normal, but then dumps you into the 'random arena' to see how long you can last against the spawned enemies?
It would be a great option for modders, as we would be able to test new ship designs for play balance against a variety of other ships without going thru the 2 or 3 days (or hours

If anybody has a systems mod that does the same thing, I'll take it
