As title says. Ships would have to lose a mid or two and gain a high or two, while ships that are already full of guns should see some hardpoints removed in favor of fixed damage or ROF bonus.
There are two main plusses I see: for say ECM ships, jammers ARE the main weapon - why not put them on highs then? Secondly, those same ships have to ditch tank to fit jamming. Now they will be still greatly constrained because of resources taken by jammers, but at least slots will be available.
As a side change, in general shield tank would be boosted due to many modules formerly occupying those slots are now on highs (for ships that used to fit ewar; others have modules just moved for no net change). Finally, this change will force change towards ships with more utility highs.
(with that change, cloak could become a midslot module - no effect on other ships)
As for drawbacks - I don’t see any conceptual ones as most ships could retain their fits, just with few modules moved in a way I believe makes more sense. The main problems would come for PVE shield tanked ships due to loss of few mids, but I think Gila nerf wouldn’t hurt either.
What you have missed is that shield tank vs utility is meant to be a trade off.
Armour tank has to trade off vs dps instead.
So this would make shield tanks have no downside.
How many ships fit those utility items on mids (excluding web and scram)? If you exclude ships bonused for that, few. Note that utility stuff people fit more often - like tracking computers and sebos - would remain midslot thingies and compete with shield tank for mids. Also:
shield tank would be actually weaker on most ships due to removal of 1-2 mids per ship because web and scram would be hislot modules now.
ships bonused for utility would have more choice regarding tank than now - they would be closer to all damage dealing ships.
The game should have been designed differently from the beginning and changing it now would be a world class train wreck that ultimately gets us nowhere since, rebalance, rebalance, rebalance, (10 years later), more rebalancing until finallly…
BOOM!
…We essentially end up where we started except we wasted a lot of dev time doing something ultimately pointless.
What would be your intended purpose of shuffling all these mod slots around? Shuffling slots for the sake of shuffling?
And all of that because you want to use utility ‘weapons’ in the highs? In my Maulus I drag the sensor damps to my top row keybinds for easier access as ‘main weapons’. But that requires me one second of dragging, instead of requiring the game developers a year of rebalancing all of the ships.