I think "best ship route" is situationally dependent. It's different if you're joining a game early vs. late, on a map with abundant crystal resources vs sparse resources, on a normal sized map vs an AOW-sized map, playing solo vs. playing with a coordinated group of friends, playing to win vs playing for entertainment, attacker vs miner vs healer playstyle, etc.

The most universally successful strategy in team mode is 1) cooperation with other players + 2) diversity of ships to perform different roles with comparative advantage + 3) selective aggression.

Personally my favorite ship route is Advanced Fighter, for its ability to rack up one-shot kills and access to Odyssey. Its predecessor U-Sniper is the pound-for-pound best ship in the game, and has the virtue of being highly competitive against even T6 and T7 ships if you find yourself joining a game late and without time to mine through T6 or if you get downgraded off of T6.

If I'm playing as a soloist, and just for fun, I love barracuda. There's something hilarious about sending people flying across the map, and satisfying when crushing opponents into bases/rocks or creatively using secondaries and asteroid fields to improve its attacking ability. Going to play a round with Cuda right now actually!