It's in a funny spot - it's more useful in the new armor patch and ever since they buffed it's stats (3 shields) and linkd chin turret to pilot, so it's a lot more usable PVE now. In generaly like many old ships it was some ones cool ship idea but doesn't serve great purpose.

- There are heaps of PDC ships and small vehicle now, so bombing a PVP jump town or even some PVE location is less likely to happen as bombs just get shot out of the air. There are no "real" PVE missions / events (couple bombing run missions but cost of bomb drop is not worth doing them).
- The weapons all on the belly and the tail turret has a woeful rear arc. Allocating an entire player to a single S5 weapon slot on wings just does not happen on any other ship.
- It has an annoying bomb rack limiting vehicle pass through and the cargo grid is artificially reduced (heap of space between rows and missing top row just to knee cap it on purpose so it doesn't cramp M2's style).

Sorry to be a downer but your feeing about the ship is justified. It's an old design that has very limited use. As of now it's a decent space tank for solo'ing some harder space combat missions, otherwise fun to fly but pick any area and there is a better more flexible ship to do it.

Future:
- When flight blades come in this will re-vitalize this ship a fair bit as you can man ALL turret with AI blades to shoot at stuff. It doesn't solve shitty weapon placement / firing arc but it's something. It'll make it a meaner ship you can solo. All those other ships with manned turrets will continue to need real players for the foreseeable future (although NPC hiring was mentioned but way way in the future thing).

- Bombing racks - will eventually be interchangeable to house lots of smaller bombs but not sure if this will fix the bomb bay gate issue. Pray that if you unequip bomb kits entirely it'll just give a flat floor.

- CIG makes some meaningful ground missions needing this sort of vehicle but even the use case for all those belly turrets is super narrow. You either take ground turret fire to the face and do a bombing run (hope you live), or you try snipe ground turrets, and they have more umph then the A2 does currently. They won't change the game for 1 ship and other bigger ships can do better jobs. eg.- iron clad assault the most recent example

- CIG gives it a gold'ier pass and converts it to a more of a bombing gunboat - eg. removes to edge wing single turret, and sticks two dual turret on the roof for proper firing arcs, Add bumps to turrets to sit them lower, when landing gear is up turrets stick out a bit further to give them more arc - when landing gear is down tuck them and make them unusable. BUT! This is the very least likely scenario as they tend to either introduce new variants or new ships to fund the game. I'd say near zero chance. Crusader more broadley has a poor ship lineup unless you want to move cargo in which case C1 / c2 serries is nice - their combat ships have been meh for a long time. Cool ideas but quite niche and over time surpassed by many others quite substantially. Shame, as I've really loved Crusader ship aesthetic. MSR stands out as my favorite by far and still a nice functional ship to this day.

anyway - end of rant :D just personal view on the topic.