You are mistaking epic with good.
As I said before I think STL is a Good campaign but not Epic. (Or did everyone forget what the word Epic really means? )
Perhaps you have.
After all STL, though small-scale missions, does in essence chronicle how
your wing singlehandedly turns the tide of the campaign in Antares and is almost completely responsible for the destruction of the Hammer of Light as a meaningful fighting force.
Epic was, after all, originally used to describe things
exactly like these. It's Homer without the 10k extras running around killing and dying and
doing absolutely nothing of consequence, Gilgamesh, or any of a number of Viking tales.
Yeah but that was one of the final missions. Most STL missions are pretty small scale.
Again, the original epic, Gilgamesh, is about two guys doing awesome stuff and barely have anything else. The Viking works typically are about
one guy doing awesome stuff, and have perhaps 100 extras "on the page" at most. STL easily surpasses that.
Small scale is a frame of reference problem. Lest we forget, even the smallest-scale campaigns in FS1 are conflicts on a scale unmatched. Hundreds of kilotons of explosive power can be hurled back and forth in mere seconds. Weapons that would destroy cities and ruin biospheres are regularly employed. A single Ursa or Amun loaded out with Tsunamis could have ended any war in humanity's history in hours.
And due to it being in the FS1 area there are no beams and corvettes the whole campaign does not feel as grand and epic as say the retail FS2 campaign.
Again, this is like saying Giglamesh or The Illiad isn't epic because it lacks machineguns.
(Though machineguns tend to actually damage the epic feel; that sort of impersonal bringer of death typically does except on a vast scale or when described in extreme detail.)
