Coincidentally, my Discord and I were having this same discussion just yesterday. I agree with @Morrigan_Naes, and I personally believe there would more benefits (immersion, lore, diversity, promote cross-training) than downsides when it comes to corvettes provided being based on owning system. I also think the reintroduction of pirate corvettes as standard-issue ships would be great for the same reasons. Upwell structures could probably just provide you with your racial corvette.
These two ideas are currently listed on my CSM16 platform:
- Corvettes received correspond to station’s owning faction (or racial for Upwell)
- Reintroduce Faction Corvettes
I think Corvettes as a whole could probably use some love to make them more useful to the NPE and for “bootstrapping” past the NPE (and for skilling spree 
). At the time of writing I also have the following Corvette-points on my platform:
- Corvettes come with extra civilian turret and civilian mining laser in cargohold
- Corvettes come with full flight of civilian mining and civilian combat drones in cargohold
- Corvettes come fitted with civilian shield booster or civilian armor repairer
I’ve created a Corvette Metacard to track all Corvette related points on my platform at any given point in time.