Any reason why one should opt for a higher package than the Digital Bounty Hunter with the 300i? All these ships are just starter ships, no?
All the ships are not just starter ships, as they all have their own defined role(s), with probably the only exception being the Aurora at the moment, as it doesn't seem to offer anything other than being a more stripped down 300i series (where-in that might be the benefit/role of being more efficient, thus less fuel usage, but those kinds of things we do not know yet).
Try not to think of this game like Eve or X:3, but more as something like the older "IL-2 Sturmovik". Each plane had a designed role in that game, and you used the plane that you thought would best meet the mission you were trying to do. Now just substitute spaceship for plane and you have a better idea of how ships will work in this game, not like Eve or X:3 where it is many times the biggest ship that wins (well not truely Eve as big ships get killed all the time by starter ships when the big ship is caught in a failfit/afk/log-offsky, but you get the idea).
The combat is twitch/skill based, so something like a small, fast, maneuverable ship will be very effective doing hit and run tactics against larger, slower ships. So the 10 guys in the Idris corvette might get taken out by a lone pilot in a Scythe if the guys in the Idris did not bring fighters in the hanger and/or an escort as its guns may not be able to be aimed fast enough to hit a really good pilot.
The ships themselves are all kind of rock/paper/scissors in how Chris envisions them, with every tactic having an equal counter-tactic, and it is the meta-game in configuring/loading your ship and using that configuration and then choosing targets which are vulnerable against your configuration.
Now ships will all have different prices in game, but we don't really know what they will be or how easy/hard it is to make money to buy those ships yet (which without both pieces of information, you can't really judge the value of things yet, cause if the particular ship costs 1,000, but it takes you 2 months of playing to make that 1,000, that ship might be very expensive, but if the ship costs 10,000,000 and it only takes 5 minutes to make 10,000,000, that ship really isn't that expensive). We simply don't know yet. The only thing we know is that you won't start with a ship or with enough money to buy a ship. And that you will need to either join the army and fly missions for them, at the end of which they will give you some starting cash (which might or might not be enough to buy your own ship) and take out a loan which you need to pay back with interest in order to have enough to buy your own ship, or crew other people's ships (as many are multi-person ships) and get some pay for doing that.
What you are really getting right now is simply funding the game, and depending on the level of funding you contribute, you may receive the game itself and maybe some other benefits (alpha/beta access, hard copies of manuals/universe maps/a model of a ship/etc.)... Remember the things like the ships are really for the online persistent universe, but you can setup your own server with your own universe where you could give yourself whatever ship you want, add your own, etc., and have friends join you (assuming they own the game) and play there. Heck, I don't think there is anything stopping people from publishing their server on the internet as a public server, where you can give people infinite ships/money/etc. and simply have setup a massive war between one or more sides which is constantly raging...