Generally speaking, there were only a few ways to expand a fleet like his. One was to go wide, building numbers quickly and hoping scale could compensate for weakness.
Another was to go upward, focusing on fewer but stronger ships whose individual performance could shape battles on their own.
The first approach was tempting in unstable regions because numbers always looked reassuring on paper, but this alone did not repair infrastructure, hold territory intelligently, or respond well when command attention was split too many ways.
And command attention was always limited.
That was the part that many people tend to ignore, as there is always a voice that says 'bigger is better'.
And that is true in the current space age, but he is alone for now in this part of the universe, so he needs to keep the team tight so that he can respond to any problems.
