@Sordid before transverse jump was a free "get out of jail" card, it allowed you to avoid every fight you don't want to take. It's not that if you're ahead it's working, it always worked.
That's the point, it allowed you to get away even if you were slower than your pursuer. Now you have to be faster in order to build up enough of a lead to be able to use it, but if you're faster you don't need it in the first place.
Transverse Jump was awesome for escaping pursuing fleets, and this change is specifically designed to make that not work anymore.
This update did add Interdiction Pulse, which has a brief chargeup and then halts any pursuing fleet for a good 6-7 seconds, easily enough to turn on Sustained Burn and escape.
Doesn't that just make Transverse Jump even more pointless?
What you are asking is basically "why should elements in a game be balanced against each other?"
Don't go putting words in my mouth. That's not what I'm asking.
In the example at hand, Transverse Jump makes other tactics to escape (hiding in asteroid fields, emergency burn) or not get spotted (running dark, distractions) and the related stats less relevant, if not obsolete.
All of those are tedious and annoying, so in my opinion that's a plus.
That's a very common game design element in a lot of games. Put in an annoyance that the player has to deal with, allow them to unlock a skill or item that lets them bypass it. The challenge is in unlocking that, and not having to deal with the annoyance is the reward. Yes, Transverse Jump is better than Going Dark or hiding in asteroids. That's because you have to spend skill points to unlock it and it eats resources with every use, whereas the other things are free. Just like a rocket launcher you find in a secret room in a first-person shooter is better than the pistol you started the game with.
Of course it is, that's the whole point of getting new stuff, it's
supposed to be better. Insisting that everything should be competitive with everything else saps all sense of achievement from progressing in the game because you never unlock anything better, just sidegrades. And because your starting ability then has to be useful in all situations, those sidegrades will necessarily be situational at best.
I see Starsector falling into the same trap as Skyrim. Remember Skyrim's skill tree, with every weapon and armor skill having that +20%-per-point node at the bottom and nodes with new power attacks and abilities further up the tree? When I first played the game, I only put a single point into that starting node and then went after the other ones, because new abilities make the game more interesting and exciting. But of course I struggled, and on my second playthrough I realized the way to go is to max out that base node first and only use leftover points for the rest. But all that's doing is affecting how much my own number increases in relation to the enemy's number, which makes his/mine health bar go down quicker/slower. Compared to the ability to decapitate or paralyze people, that's a very boring thing to unlock. And that's what SS is becoming, the only useful upgrades are +X% to something.
It also doesn't help that the solo playstyle has been nerfed into the ground by making the player unable to kite the AI, so really the only useful upgrades are +X% to a stat of some AI ship that you don't even directly control.