What am I doing wrong (ship designer)

I was surprised when components started randomly appearing on my custom hall after dropping them into the Equipment Manifest. If I don't want my design covered in weirdly placed  components I need to individually hunt then down an manually shrink and/or offset them. Some of them are quite hard to select. This is a nightmare to deal with. I must be doing something wrong. I also would like to know my attack and defense stats specific to their type (beams, kinetic, shields etc). A single Combat Rating value is not interesting nor useful when designing to counter specific weapons or defenses. What gives?