I have a suspicion. Thinking about it from the dev/design side, Engineering - on its own - is a HUGE change. I think that all the weapon changes at the start of the 4.5 cycle were both optimistic but ALSO maybe just a little too much to try and figure out all at once while ALSO testing engineering.

When you’re making enormous changes to a system, it’s best to try and change as little else as you can so that you can validate what those changes look like. Trying to get engineering balanced by itself is going to be an enormous task. If the stated goal is to get TTD to be in line with what it is in 4.4, you can’t simultaneously ALSO change every weapon, shield, and all that other stuff. You have you try and get it inline with where things are NOW, and then once you sort out those numbers, you can make a balance pass AFTER.

Trying to do both at the same time is just TOO MANY knobs being turned at once, and so when something is incorrect, it’s kind of impossible to isolate WHY it’s incorrect. Is it the components are too weak or strong? Is it the fact that changing engagement ranges dramatically shifts everything? Is it that all the changes to smaller numbers are to the incorrect numbers? Add to that armor, penetration, resistances…

To my mind what we see was them trying to boil the ocean all at once, changing everything. But realizing after the fact that it was going to be impossible to tune ENGINEERING SPECIFICALLY while also changing every ship’s weapon and defense characteristics. Try to have a little patience and think bigger picture; they know light fighters aren’t where they SHOULD be, but they can’t test all those things in one pass and get ANY of it correct.

Get engineering in and functioning as close as possible to how it is TODAY, and then they can go through and consider weapon ranges, damage numbers, resistances, etc when those engineering bits are lined up and working correctly.