The death star was just an unreasonably colossal undertaking, done by engineers who were complete idiots (Oh there's no weakness OLOL). Surely there are far more cost effective ways to destroy a planet. The cost of rebuilding Death Star 1.1 is just too huge...
Death Star is dramatic? Big yes. But I don't see it being able to do anything that a fleet of star destroyers couldn't.
Obviously. The Death Star is horribly inefficient, logistical support would be a nightmare, and a single weakness could completely compromise the battlestation. The far more logical approach would be to construct several fleets worth of far more flexible and useful fleet assets, for probably only a fraction of the cost of a single Death Star. Granted, it was powerful, and the Death Star II had no major weakness whatsoever (hence the do-or-die attack in RotJ). But when you get right down to it, the Empire would have been crazy to think the Death Stars were efficient ways to wage war.
But the Death Star was
never about efficiency. It was about terror and intimidation. Both Death Stars were constructed as a direct response to the Tarkin Doctrine. Simply; that the presence of stupefyingly powerful tools in the Empire's arsenal would incite such terror in its citizenry, that all rebellion would cease. Grand Moff Tarken conceived of the idea, and that was why he was in charge of the Death Star project, as well as all the other superweapon programs operating out the Maw facility. The Death Star would never have been used to actively wage war, and honestly would never even have fired its main gun all that often. It was built so that the Emperor could point to it and say "DO NOT **** WITH US."
That said, as I belive Han pointed out during the Yuuzhan Vong War; a Death Star or two would've come in bloody handy during that conflict.
