tanks will only appear if there are enough spawn nodes for them. by default your battle save will have more soldiers than can be deployed. you'd need to alter your battle.cfg save and reduce the number of soldiers in it. as for the layout, changing the "starting base" with a mod is simple, you can even copy/paste one from an existing saved game. as for bad implementation and horrible experiences with 1 of every item... it's a debugging tool, it's designed for functionality that _I_ need. adding one of every item is necessary because of mods, if a mod adds an item, it needs to be added to the base so that it will show up in the item list as allocatable to your craft. it's hooked up to be functional, sometimes things are necessary, no matter how horribad you perceive them to be.