Are Hulls Chump Change?

I haven't been shy about wanting cheaper ships for our Navy in order to afford the numbers we need for global missions. A high-low mix seems appropriate. I've accepted that we have a minimum hull size that we need due to our geographic position. But is hull size even a driver of costs any more? Is software the real budget hog?

Defense Industry Daily, in its email service, notes a French story about software complexity in their new ships. DID's summary said:

In the same testimony to the French lower chamber, [President of DCNS Patrick] Boissier underlines how naval programs have turned into massive software projects. The Combat Management System on FREMM frigates weights 25 million lines of code, about the same scale as TCSE and other naval software used on US Zumwalt destroyers, almost 3 times the amount of code developed for F-35s, or an order of magnitude more than on a Rafale.

I don't read enough to know what the real experts on shipbuilding think about the subject, but it strikes me that perhaps I am mistaken in even believing that we need smaller and simpler ships for the low end.

It may be that once the cost of the software is spent, building a bigger hull is really a relatively minor part of the total cost.

Still, that doesn't mean that we couldn't put the software into the higher end weapons modules that could be added in war time to simpler ships that normally sail with basic weapons but which have space for modules.

This is one of those things that I'll keep in the back of my mind as I read Navy news.