What to do about ballast flora?

So, my bf and I are fairly new to the game and we encountered ballast flora for the first time last night. Prior to this, I knew it existed and I knew it's basic mechanics. We didn't see it growing at first. Before we ever attacked it or anything, we noticed that the ballast refused to empty and we could not ascend. We read about it on the wiki and concluded the only means of destroying it we had was to use our plasma cutter. However, when we tried this it became obvious it wouldn't work. The acid was damaging our characters much faster than we were damaging the growth on the pump and it just wasn't an option to cut it off. Unable to drain the ballast due to the growth and without means to remove it, we ended the round and had to start it over.

This was extremely disappointing for several reasons. Firstly, the fact that we were forced to quit because of not being able to move rather than being killed outright was very "unfun." Even being brutally killed is good fun in this game, but that was just so anticlimactic especially since the idea of an enemy that turns the ship against you is so cool. Also, when reading about how to kill it, we found that the only effective options were things we didn't have access to. We had no source of fire damage or explosives to kill it and had never been able to buy fire or explosives prior to encountering it. So, it was literally impossible to kill for us as far as we know. Finally, I've read about some of the methods of killing it only being effective when the ballast is drained, but seeing as the entire problem was that the ballast could not be drained I don't see how having a flamer or other source of flame would have been helpful even if we did have it.

So, what is there to do about the ballast flora? In it's current state, I find it to be just extremely annoying and contracting it almost certainly means starting over for no fun reason. Is there some secret method of dealing with it I don't know about? Is there a game setting to turn it off? Is there a mod that fixes the issues with it and makes it an actually fun mechanic? Like, honestly, it's hard to believe the devs gave this the greenlight to me.