I'd adore being able to display my unused ships (bottled) in my home. Maybe get some sort of cabinet that would accept only the bottled ships. I can see having to limit how many one could store in any house (after all, we can only display so much stuff in our real homes), but if we don't really want unused ships floating around our island homes making us look like we live in a marina, but we still don't care to sell our ships that we worked hard to earn, we should be able to do something with them.

Do ships count against our backpack limit? What about all that ship equipment we can't use because it's origin specific?

Yes, but many of us don't want to sell our old ships. That's the point.