A Durin said there are squats in the Segmenteum but is being tight lip on where and how far.Count me as extremely skeptical that there are:
A. Squats within expedition range.
B. We can conduct resource trade with them safely due to distance.
C. That these expeditions will come up with anything useful given how much tech we got from Avernus, the datacore and tech conference.
If I am wrong (which would be nice because it means there are squats close by) we can just send ships without him easily. Whereas not choosing the Baron makes getting our own psy Knights online a major pain.
Regarding the merchant fleet we can just spend some (not super valuable) naval actions to boost our cargo capacity. Which is already going up overtime as referenced earlier thanks to our merchantman production lines.
Edit: Checking back we can make 9 Mass Conveyors per 5 years with the appropriate action which also gives us more escorts at the same time.
B. Being a rogue trader is all about taking risky journies for profit. It's what they do. Having him will make any expedition easier and more likely to succeed. Similiar to how the Baron makes traingin psyker knights easier.
C we have no idea what the expeditions will have and not all of them are tech but can also be rare metals(squats) , information we can use, or anything else Durin decides to roll for. We are not at the height of DAOT tech and truly are barely going to be at the lowest. There is still plenty of tech in the galaxy to find.