Last game I played I tried going a different route than my usual research boosting ideology.

This time I picked the one that gives you 2 free defending ships for each planet. It wasn't an insane map, I had around 10-12 planets and when I finally researched it out, all it did was cripple me financially. I went from making 12 or so credits per turn to losing 200 something per turn. I was then left with the annoying task of manually decommissioning them all while grumbling at my monitor. 

Does anyone actually use this as is?

This skill would and could be so cool. Why not change it so that instead of random garbage ships it uses random user created ships of the same size. Give those ships no life support so they cant stray very far from the planets they are guarding, or tether them to planets so they cant get more than 5-10 hexes away, or bind them to the planet all together so all they can do is defend. Most important of all make them 0 upkeep or this skill is just useless to me. Its not game breaking to have 2 small ships orbiting a planet that cant leave and basically do nothing but defend, thus cost no credits to upkeep.