Ships

Is there a way to be a good swgoh player without ships?

yes, of course.

What you absolutely have to have early is a fleet strong enough to get 3 stars on the zeta ability challenge.

Later you will need a certain level of ship power from your Galactic Republic characters in order to get General Skywalker (a vital character) -- but most of those ships are easy to get. The necessary GP will come from gearing the pilots, which you will want to do anyway.

Eventually you will also need certain ships for the Raddus challenge & the Finalizer challenge. But you don't need those soon. You need them when you're ready to start chasing Galactic Legend Rey and/or SLKR.

The ships can help you a lot, but if you don't like them you can get by with very minimal investment there.

I would say ships are needed, how much effort you put into them is your own choice though. They’re needed for GAC, and fleet arena obviously. Useful in both TW and TB as well, without them you’ll be at a constant disadvantage in Grand Arena and you won’t be able to help as much in TW and TB which isn’t any help to your guild, not to mention you’re automatically cutting out one source of Crystal income. They’re also needed to actually farm some characters, Shaak ti and B1 for example are in the last bunch of hard nodes on fleet so without one you won’t be able to farm some toons. So basically ships are needed but If you don’t like them that much then you can avoid them, you’ll just always be at some sort of disadvantage so if You want to be competitive in any way you’ll need them.

Not only do you need them for events but you will find that since nobody really cares about ships you have a good chance to climb high in the arena and get higher currency and crystal pay out. The more ship currency you obtain the faster you get zetas and zetas are probably the most important piece of the game. Before I joined a more powerful guild I didn’t give a care about ships at all and being behind in ships meta crippled my TB and GAC performance. I know it’s boring and such a garbage part of the game but if you don’t have a semi decent fleet you will regret it. Trust me.