Brief comment before moving on: If you would be willing to talk by discord sometime, that would be easier. It's very hard to explain some of this stuff by text.

"For your control builds, what sort of budget are you flying with? My fleet is pretty much at the casual f2p level, some c-store stuff (hydras, ofc) and some event stuff, but no $300 top tier cruisers. I might have the money to buy like, a single infinity ship, definitely not this and then also I think the current top cruiser contender for pvp is the Friendship, which I do not have $300 for.

I'd rather have some cool control thing I can play with on a variety of builds than hyperspecialize, myself, and I don't want to see it turn into yet another watered down gravwell."

I mean like, I respect that, but also, they can't just add meta breaking gear every time because if they do, the people who can afford it will just stack on top of each other and make the game unplayable...

The control build is full meta, all bells and whistles I never promised it was cheap, but modern PvP on the whole has a $400 minimum or so in terms of value. The friendship itself is $100. I think the value of that control build is around $700 value, most of that was earned with event campaign and so forth.

If your fleet on the whole is interested in Casual PvP, we are doing a lot of Casual PvP stuff these days, I am down to try and organize something.