About 35 minutes in to the 3/24 stream, Paul says this:

"For the next patch (not 1.7,which is still about a month out) we are going to, or at least the current plan is to have a new system...or the ability to download whole factions and ship styles from Steam."

This is very cool and a nice addition. But this second part REALLY makes me smile:

"Right now, what I'm working on...it probably won't be an in-game editor, but an editor that will let players make the Flavor Text...make things like that and will be able to have some modifiers and stuff you'll be able to build in. So if you make your Klingons and your Romulans, you can make it so the Klingons-Romulans respond to each other appropriately and have the right text and hate each other automatically..."

This is great.  Thank you, Paul! I am very much looking forward to this little feature!