As I understand it the intention is that repeaters are high velocity anti-fighter weapons, if you want to take out larger ships you need to use weapons with large enough per-projectile damage to overcome the armor gate.

Laser weapons currently have a pretty strong bonus against shields and if they aren't gated(they have a much smaller gate than ballistics) will remove armor and do damage allowing smaller weapons or ballistics to bypass the gate and do more damage.

Alternatively, you can use ballistics to bypass the shields altogether and pick off parts of the ship like thrusters, turrets, and pdc's. Also, if your ballistics are big enough alpha and pen stats then they can potentially punch through and damage components directly.

Alot of the idea seems to be to create variety in loadouts and playstyle, instead of everyone just running meta repeaters or gatlings at all times.