Now that there are more barges out there and once .86 comes out there will be more player controlled stations, I think it's time to make this ship more useful - In a creative way.
Changes:
Making it a lot slower, possibly as slow as the Barge itself, would be the sacrifice. The trade-off would be a huge increase in cargo. I'm thinking about 9,000 or 10,000. The only other possible changes I could think of that would make it more useful would be more nanobots and shield-batteries and maybe allowing it to carry cargo pods.
Justification:
These changes would put a -real- use to this ship and grant it the fate that it has been created to do. Slowing it down would make sure that the cargo is not abused.