That does sound like it would be theoretically doable, but it would still be a ton of work. Every ship you want multiple colours for would have to be re-skinned, basically a separate model created for each colour, and these new models added to the core. Technically it wouldn't even be a code change, as far as this goes -- it would be no different from adding new ships to the core, I guess, except they'd be identical in every way except their colour. But as you note, some additional interface element would have to be added to the ship loadout screen, since no-one would want to scroll through 8 (or even 2) versions of the same ship just to pick a colour, obviously. I have no idea how difficult a code change that would be, but I strongly doubt it would be trivial.
Actually, this would require a lot of thought, and might not be so easy at all. In the heat of battle, no-one will want to take the time to pick a pretty colour for their ship. Heck, there's barely enough time to make sure you have the right load-out, most of the time! So, if this were to be done, you'd need some way for a pilot to choose their preferred colour just once, and then for ships of that colour to be automatically chosen from then on, without the pilot ever having to worry about it again. But then the game would need some way of "knowing" which colour selection to associate with which models, and would need to have some way of displaying only those models in the loadout screen... It doesn't sound very easy at all, actually. It sounds like a lot of programming. I mean, I don't *know*, but... it doesn't sound like a trivial, simple change.
An additional problem is that, IIRC, there is only a limited number of ships that can actually be in a core. Every new ship (or piece of tech, or other item) added to the core takes up an extra "definition", and there's only so many to go around; doubling the number of ships, never mind making it 8 times higher, might not even be possible at all. It would require some pretty fundamental changes to the code. I'm not 100% sure of this, though -- just something I remember hearing from people who know this sort of stuff, ages ago.
Anyway, even if it's doable and not super-complex, it would still take many hours for someone to do this in their spare time. You'd have to convince someone who can do code and graphics to volunteer their time for this project... Or learn how to do it.
