My 2 cents . I don't particularly like fixed fleet restrictions (there are enough other games that restrict what you can take). The only point I could see them at would be in a tournament setting and I would expect any tournament organizer to set such restrictions themselves.
I'm not fond of arbitrary restrictions either (though I will concede that they are very quick). I'm suggesting a means of avoiding this by generating a pool of available units that the player can pick and choose from for a particular engagement - which units they choose to take is up to them but at least they will have faced a level of constraint on which units are available.
Phroggelator: Looking at ship design from a standpoint of current wet navy building trends is only one way of looking at things. What about a case where a single fixed volume system (a drive or power plant) necessitates larger ships? Multiple science fiction universes work on such a system and it forces certain design considerations. The best example would be David Weber's Mutineer's Moon series (+Armageddon Inheritance and Heirs of Empire) where moon size battle planetoids are the ship design of choice and smaller ships are used only as parasites on the larger ships or as in-system ships. The system in question in this case is the core tap (power source) and faster then light drive (a variation on an old traveller stutter drive).
Another area or discussion would be organic or partially organic ships. Would there be a ship yard requirement for a ship that grows itself? In such a case wouldn't it be likely for one or two sizes or species of ship to be prevalent?
What about species whose societal structure necessitates larger ships? Races like the Borg from Startrek or the K'kree from Traveller.
The wet navy viewpoint is indeed, just one way of looking at things. I picked it because of the likely wide familiarity with most people, however it's just a wrapper around the underlying constraints - resources and time. There are other potential constraints as well as you pointed out but none of them remove the need for resources and time.
Single fixed/minimum volume system? Sure, you'll have a few more big ships with the critical system, but then I'd expect that they would carry smaller ships to mitigate the risk of losing such a resource. Note, though that each ship still requires resources and time to build - big ships just take longer and consume more resources.
Moon-sized ships? An extreme case, but again you still have find the resources and time to build something that big - although I'd argue that anything smaller is essentially so far out of scale that they're irrelevant to something that size (I haven't read the books though). Still if everyone has to build at that scale to be effective then you can also scale the build times and resources (assuming small ships can be ignored).
Organic ships? They fact they self-assemble/grow in no way removes the resource or time requirements for them to be finished. It may be that in place of a yard the action takes place in a gigantic birthing suite or surgery assuming any such is required. As for species variability, if we assume the species in question is totally artificial and therefore completely outside anything resembling an ecosystem, there is no reason to limit designs available and the reasons why you might want a different species become the same as why you might build differing classes of ships. If *is* part of a ecosystem (ie. a found species modified or adapted if necessary), then your variability comes from choosing a species that can operate optimally in differing environments. Basically a species adapted for deep/interstellar space unlikely to be operating at it's peak when it's too close to a star for example. In any case they still require resources and time to be finished.