It's true - you do have to be careful
I find ShipEdit(and the fat pdf "manual") to be excellent. While there are some values in the shiplist that are a bit unknown, there's also good info on acceptable ranges etc.
There is an installer in the downloads section for "Bartoks_Basement" courtesy of Bonk
He packaged my shiplist and mods into that handy installer with NSIS. There are some cheesy ships in there and some nice mod work in general thanX to Atolm, DonKarnage and several others... (the Fedz have the BattleStar Galactica and viper fighters - ISC have the Cylon Basestar) . Some beautiful Vulcan models also in both Fed and Rom, can't remember all the others. Mirak and Lyran weren't playable (I took a shortcut...)
I did have some Shadow vessels in the mod, though I didn't have .brk models. I configured/armed them differently than on RDSL and I like the latter better. One "bug" that occurred in one of the shadow ships i remember was a PPD "continual fire" bug. Seemed to occur because I had 4 on one hardpoint...
We live and learn