Delenda Est was the first mission I ever FREDded, and while I'm really grateful for the praise it's gotten, I don't think that it's - as some have said - one of the great missions of all time. Like most forced fail missions, it breaks naturalism at a few points in order to make sure its ending goes off as the plot demands.
If I were redoing it I think I'd make a few changes that would push it in away from that direction, which would also, incidentally, make it a fun multi mission. I don't know if I'd want to replace the current DE with this, but it might make a fun standalone - 'could the Wargods win' and whatnot.
What I'd do (using only our R1 bag of tricks, nothing from the R2 sandbox)
1) Remove all hull guardians. Very few ships have them anyway, not a big deal.
2) Unguardian the Carthage flank beam. Make sure it's heavily armored still.
3) If the Carthage flank beam is taken out, fighters would arrive to attempt to SSM strike the Hanuman. If the player can in turn stop the SSM strike, the Imperieuse would never arrive, and the Wargods would destroy the Carthage OR the Imperieuse would arrive and try to launch fighters to tag the Hanuman for its own forward beams
4) If the Imperieuse does arrive post-Hanuman, as the mission usually flows, its forward beams would not be guardianed. It would retain, however, its kickass escorts, and probably in greater numbers. If players could get past these escorts, defang the forward beams, or badly damage the Imperieuse's hull, the Imp would withdraw and the mission would again succeed.
These are all ways of removing some of the 'nudges' from the mission design and allowing greater player agency, with the obstacles to player success now being extreme difficulty rather than 'you can't do that'.
