@ Wyvern: Your experiences are similar to mine as well. I tried a character with all Combat skills and a few player-only skills from Technology (in the simulator). Sure, I could kill a few more ships easily and efficiently, but it still has trouble punching much above its weight, and multiple enemy capitals will ruin its day. Also, the AI kites and turtles much, much more. If I use Unstable Injector, the enemy gets too much range advantage, and winning the flux war consistently becomes too hard. If I do not use Unstable Injector, I spend too much time chasing ships, so even if I can crush an enemy ship, I lose much time off of peak performance simply trying to keep up with kiting ships. (You cannot solo fleets if you cannot beat the clock.) I tried truly soloing a battlestation with a Paragon (with no cheerleaders for ECM debuffs), but that will not work. The station will focus-fire everything at you, and it outranges you. Squalls and Gauss will eat shields, HILs will melt everything else, and Flash bombers will eat what is left of your flagship. The closest I could get to soloing a battlestation was to deploy additional ships for ECM stacking, enough that my beam Paragon could outrange the battlestation, then have Paragon do all of the fighting.
And because AI kites so much, and some fighters are very powerful for their cost, I generally send fighters at the problem. Nothing outruns fighters.
I recently noticed that people like to refer to so-called Megas-style combat. While mildly amused, I do not play that way anymore in 0.8. Even with skills, it is simply inefficient at best and ineffective at worst. The current Megas-style combat in 0.8 is fleet action, with few elite ships controlled by me and a bunch of clunkers with relatively common weapons (so that I do not reload games the moment a clunker dies). Also, at least half of my ships are carriers, and the majority of fighters are Talons, with few Khopesh and Claws (and later, Sparks) used by the elite ships. (If I use Astral, I use one Dagger wing, and the rest are Longbows and Khopesh.) So far, my fleet is completely unskilled, and it can wipe endgame bounty fleets with few casualties. I doubt it can handle double endgame fleets in one battle, and I need to bring everything (or get character skills) against a hero battlestation.
So far, my favorite flagships are either Paragon for pure power or Legion for carrier-and-brawling combo action.
I would like to use nothing but elite ships, but either I would need to grind too long or cheat. For now, I use mostly clunkers.