Is a shield bypass a mod thing, as I don't recall seeing one.
And yeah, if you know how I play I'm an AI fleet commander kinda guy so I am usually beholden to what the AI wants to do. Often feels like herding cats.
The few times I have found the AI to be properly turning it's shields off to fight is when I took 3 onslaughts to a radiant battleship. Put them on execute and watched as the hounded it across the map, basically ignoring the smaller ships or blowing them out of the way. Fun, but it's sorta like playing with time as shields are inherently regenerative, where as armour most certainly isn't.
Could be cool if an overload disabled your shield for the rest of the battle, but I can't see such a suggestion being all that popular.
Anything less then battleship or heavy cruiser armour just feels too easy to peel off with even HVDs. With sabots being equally as good against mid to low tier armour as well, from my anecdotal experience. Don't get me wrong, I like the sabots as they are, but I guess now I'm mroe complaining about them from the other end where the shield/armour system isn't great enough to resist them. Not to mention the lack of decently ranged point defence weapons. I don't see a machine gun or vulcan being able to intercept any sabot fire. Can a flak do so reliably?