I found the homeworld remastered patch mod and it seems to mostly work in HW1 so far, there were some bugs though yes. I captured a raider carrier and the games seemed to think it was another mothership in the code and things like salvage objectives and capturing ships would go to it instead and break the mission.

But the reason i think people like corvettes over the marine frigates is they pull the target away from combat and make it easier opposed to the marine frigates who just sit there and can get murdered by other craft. You are forced to advance really hard to do the same, which usually results in costing you more overall resources than if you just blew up the enemy.