(Login time-out ate my first post and I came back much later to repeat, so I kinda missed the bus on this conversation.)
If we're opening up the topic of damage types to make energy PD more effective at an anti-fighter role, how about EMP? Specifically a PD weight, light mount, burst emp-beam.
Now, hear me out. It would certainly be effective, in a quick sim test if I lazily pass a couple of ion beams over some approaching unshielded fighter wings I can end up with multiple wings reduced to unpowered, spinning, projectiles, pancaking themselves against my shield impotently and exploding on impact (incidentally, hillarious!) and even with shielded ones a decent number of EMP arcs go through to disrupt things. With proper point targeting things would only get more impressive. With a tweaked auto-fire priority that switches fighters after disabling rather than trying to destroy with their meager energy-damage output, medium mount ion-beams would be absolutely murderous anti-fighter weapons themselves, potentially even too good given their obscene range after hullmods.
It seems to take just a tiny splash of EMP damage to flame-out a fighter semi-reliably, so an anti-fighter oriented light weapon needn't have enough sustained damage to obsolete ion cannons in their anti-ship role whilst still filling their niche role admirably. Whilst EMP damage seems to have no effect on missiles, keeping them from being too universal in the PD arena too. So I propose a light mount, short-&-fast-ish burst, pure-emp beam, with a targeting priority for non-disabled fighters over active fighters and set to ignore missiles due to being useless against them. This missile avoidance further improves their anti-fighter role, as they'll no longer get distracted by swarmer missile spam and could even be used to make potentially underperforming decoy flares more attractive, if they could be left on the targeting list after missiles get taken off.
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Bonus round craziness below:
Additionally/alternatively, and because the energy PD selection is rather bland presently, how about a hybrid bastardization of the overwhelming point-blank firepower of vulcan cannons and the area denial ability of flak? And by that I mean an uncontained plasma flamethrower!
I'm talking incredibly short range, like 50-100, whatever it takes to just barely reach outside the shield radius of your average cruiser, with a tediously slow projectile speed, so as to give it a decent lifetime and make it moderately possible for a fighter to evade even at close range. But for that you get the firepower to eliminate a near limitless number of missiles along a very narrow vector (should you be brave enough to leave your shield off!) and the ability to disrupt evasion corridors and deny airspace inside your shield bubble to swarmy fighters, without just destroying them by default or crippling strike/standoff craft.
As an added benefit, it could potentially open up more knife-fight range safety-override builds to energy mount ships and give a lore-friendly option for low-tech/pirate energy mounts (there's few cruder ways to weaponize pure energy than superheating up some junkmatter and hosing it out of a nozzle in someone's general direction.
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