One thing that I think could help FREDers would be the ability to have certain beam-free SEXPs based on a weapon tag.
For example, AAAfs would have a fighterbeam tag, BGreens would have a capbeam tag.
Then there would be two new SEXPs:
beamfree-fighter-all
beamfree-capital-all
So you can in a mission quickly turn on all fighter beams, turn them off, etc.
As a BWO example, I'm manually turning on and off every weapon when there's three sets of beam weapons on the Golgotha:
Anti-fighter
Capital ship (Secondary beams)
Meson Cannon
With a setup like this, I or someone else could beam lock or free the beams in each category without having to manually changing each and every beam.
It could also be extended to apply to other SEXPs. As opposed to beam-protect-ship you could have missile-protect-ship fighterbeam-protect-ship, etc. all based on the weapon tag.
Just an idea, since from what I've read here it doesn't seem like this has been implimented.