I gave this a whirl for old time's sake, and I gotta say that it's still pretty good. They're pretty balanced on the lower side of performance if only because they're so slow and have no shields. But the Viking II puts up a very good fight with its 3 fighter bays.
One thing I've noticed when playing with Exelerin is that some of the hulls are missing from the original starting market places in the Heindall system. Only the two viking frigates and the Monarch are showing up in the marketplaces. I've taken a look into the files but I have yet to find a reason why. The problem might be due to the limited number of market places perhaps, and capturing a new planet that has different variables than the ones in the home system might help.
Edit: Noticed some of the ships are not regenerating CR. Normally this wouldn't be a problem as the Thule ships don't lose CR when deployed, but when they take damage, or are refitted in the field, or anything else lowers the CR, there is no way to get it back as far as I'm able to discover.
In order to change it back, some values have to be entered into the "cr % daily" column in the ship_data.csv file.