My impression has been that regular fighters don't have much of a place in the player's arsenal.
Enemies seem to have less carriers now so just swarmer/PD is enough to keep all but the largest swarms at bay, and if you've got one or two officers maxed in carrier skills, 3-slot carriers using only bombers (one longbow, two cobra seems to work best) are ridiculously lethal against anything but high-tech ships. If it's fat enough, it dies.
In fact, in general, sabot missiles just seem to be extremely powerful if you've got a huge supply of them, either the medium launcher with expanded racks or a longbow wing.
The medium sabot launcher, and longbow wings are both fairly rare at least, but there just seems to be no enemy defence against either with fighters being so rare. PD fighters are really needed to deal with those missiles or bombers, since sabot needs very long range PD to survive. And at the very least, fighters are going to make it harder to bully an overloaded ship.
Three good ways I can think of to bring more regular fighters into the game to stop uncontested sabot/longbow dominance is:
* Have more warships with hangars, ships decent at direct combat with less hangars than an equivalent carrier would have. Only such ships I can think of are Gemini and Prometheus Mk. II, and both are almost never seen in combat.
* Buff converted hangar; it just has way too many downsides for something that already costs a lot of OP, and is pointless on anything but destroyers because the cost scales with the size of the ship even though the benefit doesn't.
* Buff mining laser: Plenty of ships already have mining drones screening for them, mining laser is so weak though that it's pretty much pointless.