Started this recently. Fun game. Dicked around some then restarted after realising I could have captured a bunch people.
So in the new game I grabbed the gal from Ansels quest and made har part of my combat team. In hindsight it would have been ironic to break her and make her a floor crawler so Ansel can keep using her.
I did both. My Mae turned out to be one of the best slaves I got (I didn't savescum their traits) and I trained her while making her the Floorcrawler and then sent her to the Arena where her Steel Maiden, Malevolent, Bloodthirsty personality did quite well for me.
Is there a downside to not processing a few female slaves? I don't want bloat my household ATM. Aside from them obviously taking up slots for capturing.
No real downside outside occupying the slots as far as I know. You might want to sell them though, you'd get decent money if you sell them in Crystal Heights or Watery Eyes--more so than from the processor.
With all the talk about leveling up medicine and Doctors Kits requiring 40 med I've never seen anyone mentioning that the basic revive also gives medicine skill ups very frequently. Ofc that means someone is losing stats but if you plan to replace them with combat slaves or elite mercs later that shouldn't be much of an issue. The Rifle Savant keels over if hit by a stiff breeze anyway.
That's one way to look at it, you can retrain the stats too if you want.