What a strange thing to say. It's as if we'd never any designed any missions with these ships, and thus we have to make bald assertions about how they perform, instead of informed statements based on our experience with them.
You also are personally invested in being correct on this, and have possibly designed the missions and the specs in such a way that they don't logically progress from existing frames of reference. It's quite possible that intentionally or unintentionally you've provided them plot armor, from where we're sitting.
Abso-****ing-lutely. All that matters in the end is telling a good story which is fun to play. Anything and everything will be modified to meet that goal.
I will give you a spoiler:
almost every ship in BP has some form of plot armor to make it perform better in its fluff role, from guardianed subsystems to changing armor types to custom HP; you could probably construct some kind of technobabbly justification for it, but why bother?
Our view is that a ship's effectiveness in the setting needs to be reflected by the gameplay. It's not Harpoon where the stats of the ship on paper are exact matches to the fluff. The stats, in combination with per-mission modification, exist to support the fluff. If the fluff asks for light cruisers which are meant to fill the gap left by the abandonment of the cruiser design while being deployed more intelligently - and absolutely, there is a space for those roles to be tried out - those cruisers will be made to work in that role.
Even if you want to argue that it's somehow inherently a failed concept from the get-go, well, it's quite possible there are people in the setting saying the same thing. Sometimes dumb ideas happen; Murphy's Law rules all systems, even design bureaus and fleet doctrine. Nothing should be flawless.
I've been wondering, the massive turrets on the Hecate reminds me of the battleship guns we have. Is it a possibility to have those turrets fire some kind of anti-ship projectile that does several thousand damage per projectile (higher than TerPulse, lower than beams) and fires at a intermediate rate with a bit of range behind it, instead of those little flak? Would be pretty cool...but then again, the Hecate's still going to be forced to carrier role, even if it had those anti-ship guns.
Pulse cannons already do more DPS than most light beams.
