No no, that is a misunderstanding. The game is NOT hard, not at all. What you are describing is just a very bad and rudimentary economy system that is still in need of a lot of fixing. Yet at its core this game is way too easy. I can't even recall a single battle that I lost or god forbid that I lost because the "AI" outsmarted me.
All the game does to increase the "level of difficulty" is give the AI even more money and in general introduce features the player has zero influence on (land battles, etc.) The AI designed ships are still way worse than anything a player with a day of experience in the ship builder can come up with so even if the AI has thousands of them all that does is create hundreds of lame battles you are going to win anyway, which in turn is a drain on your time. Which can aslo be said for the argument of "we have shared designs now". Cause I ain't got time to either design a ship for each year, for each tech level and each nation in the hopes the AI has all it takes to build them. Even a whole community will take forever to provide for that. Besides, even then the AI will ruin said designs with the first refit anyway.
So yeah, 1.3. is still firmly headed towards a wall in my opinion, which is really really sad, because of all the wasted potential.