In case anyone is still reading this, there are a couple of points that haven't been floated yet;
There is a Tie Scout - it has large, vertical tops to its wings & slightly bent outwards lower wings. It carries a pilot & a sensor operator, has a hyperdrive, 1 laser cannon & a powerful sensor suite. For scouting missions, it's the imperial fighter of choice, much better at the job than the AG & probably cheaper too.
At the height of the empire, there were 25,000 ISDs in operation. Even if there were 10 times that many VSDs (250k) & 10 times as many non-SD large vessels (2.5m), that's not a lot - in the scale of the galaxy. There were over 69 million known inhabited worlds in the SW galaxy, meaning with the above figures each big ship has to cover nearly 25 worlds - & that's not allowing for the number of these ships that were arranged into fleets, armardas, wing-pairs, etc., which would stretch the lines even thinner. Given this, smaller hyperdrive-equipped vessels would be a necessity to act as remote force projection & shuttle escorts to name just 2 likely deployment reasons.
Since playing as the empire is going to happen, flying an AG with it's X-wing - like performance is entirely viable for gameplay (for the deployments mentioned above there could be a mission where the player is launched into a furball through an attack that the parent ship is engaged in to respond to a distress call elsewhere, or a shuttle escort mission, fighting off a full squadron of enemy fighters while trying to keep the VIP safe). While a rarer vessel, it would still have a role in the Imperial starfighter corps. As it's an Assault Gunboat, it should be more likely to survive being involved in an assault - where the enemy might be more likely to send up defensive fighters - than, for example, a Skipray Blastboat, which has an even more impressive array of weapons, more solid hull & resilient shields, but the maneuverability of a brick.
