So, ive had 2 characters on ship one and 7 on ship 3. I deleted the 2 on ship 1 and 1 on ship 3, leaving 6. Yet, i go to make another for all the spaces i just made deleting those characters....and now im supposed to buy those slots back...? What the actual @#$%?

Yep, it's been a thing since PSO2 ever was released in Japan. You don't buy a permanent character slot. Instead, you buy the right to create a character.

There's a link to a thread that asks about this in my pinned guides and help mega-thread: https://forum.pso2.com/topic/1472/4th-character-slot-deleted

The confirmation dialogue even says this:

The three free characters are total on the account across all ships. (IE: if you have two on ship 1, and 1 on Ship 2, you've used up all three free slots.)