I rather think that frigates being nonviable as a line-of-battle combatant in the face of capital ship firepower and range is a feature, not a bug. Frigates have been incapable of facing proper warships as far back as the Age of Sail.
You do realize that real world naval classification has always tried to keep up with ship development and figuring out what to do with them later? They are completely arbitrary and serve no purpose in this game, and, apart from the broadest possible definitions, in real navies, either, if we're being honest.
No, not at all. The terminology used for things indicates how the designer is thinking of them, and the role they're supposed to analogize to - obviously not a perfect one-to-one match, but think about it. You could easily refer to spaceships by completely different terminology; they're called frigates, destroyers and cruisers in Starsector
for a reason. That's a deliberate analogy.
If I got your other points right, you would much rather prefer a literally tiered approach to ships? Where capitals would be untouchable by cruisers and down, and cruisers would be immune to destroyers and frigates and so on? Where's the fun in that? Gameplay as it is today is already pushing the player to field bigger ships the more the game progresses, and it kind of makes sense. But that doesn't mean one is limited to Paragon-only in late game.
I fail to see the point in your argument, and it might just be that there isn't really one.
Obviously you didn't get my points right; you draw a hugely exaggerated and unsupported conclusion. Please point to where - anywhere - I indicated that larger classes of ships should be 'immune' to smaller ones.
What I said was that 30 FP of capital ship ought to be able to reliably outfight 30 FP of frigates in a shootout, if you stuck them in a 'white room' scenario. And of course this isn't actually a call for change; this is me maintaining that current class balance is broadly in the right place, since that's currently true, and stating that I think
changing this relationship would be bad for gameplay. Larger ships being more effective in slugging matches is the whole point of larger ships; if they're not, then there's absolutely no point in having them.
If you'll recall, this whole thread started with the complaint that smaller ships need a 'gimmick' to compete with larger ones in combat, because they generally aren't tough enough to stand up to heavy firepower. Which is correct, and should remain so.
Does that clarify things for you?