My main concerns here balance-wise are that it's a lifetime build limit combined with the fact that Maldrood doesn't have access to the regular Victory 2's you can effectively get locked out of that ship entirely. To me this is somewhat cringeworthy as I tend to take my time during GC's and over time it's entirely possible to get whittled down.
Their lack of VSDIIs is actually because they have the Procursator, which fills the same general slot as the VSDII, not because they have the Crimson. For all the Imperial factions, we've basically given them either the VSDII or the Procursator. The presence of the Crimson version is partially why we went for the Procursator on that particular faction, but them having the CC VSDII isn't locking them out of any permanent build options.
I'd personally prefer it if the active limit was around 10 so that you would actually have enough of them to make up the majority of their own fleet, but at the same time if it were at 5 and they were given access to the regular Victory 2's it wouldn't be that bad either.
The limit is 15, so it's more than enough to build a whole fleet of them.
On the canon front I do think it's somewhat odd to argue that you shouldn't be able to build too many since the point of having most factions playable is to affect how that faction turns out. Again these are just opinions and I have /no/ idea what the general thought process is on decisions regarding balance in terms of gameplay vs canon. I also hope that at least if people do still disagree they can still understand my PoV.
This would be more applicable if it was something produced during the timeline and we let people build more of them (unless it were something where the reason there were so few was for something outside the control of the player, like it's made of some super-rare spacecrystal or something), but the Crimson Command fleet was one that had been built prior, and passed from commander to commander as that fleet was taken; it wasn't something built by Maldrood or anyone else. even when the people who held it at any given time tried to supplement the Crimson Command fleet with more VSDs (or ISDs), they were just the regular grey ones. You're basically requisitioning them as opposed to building them, if you wanna think about it that way. The most lore-friendly options (and they are more of a story piece in the first place) were either use them solely as starting forces, which would technically be more accurate but would mean we have less to put in their pool of starting forces and then they end up losing most of them before the player has a chance to build up a fleet of just them if they wanted, or do it the way they currently are. If we removed the build limit, we'd also remove the things that make them more powerful to begin with, since those were just added to make them stand out more as opposed to being something canon; they were intended in lore to be standard VSDs, the yard just ran out of the proper material and finished them with a different alloy. If they were your standard buildable VSDII role, Maldrood loses the Procursator and also loses the buffs to the CC VSDs- they'd just be red and nothing else.