Same as Thaago and Sy, I believe this is among the better reasons to use fighters . In my fleet they are the recon, point capturing, harassing and anti retreat ships.
I field a dozen fighters with the excellent Thunder wing as the main category (5 or 6 I believe), they are not really expensive, fast and hit hard.
Fighters completely change how the officers react due to having the enemy fleet revealed much sooner. They also make nice decoys for when your officers go in their main engagement, at times taking the enemy from a blind angle or badly placed shield.
As for frigates, I too dropped all bar the extremely survivable Monitors, with Brawlers as their ancestors when I still had none of the aforementioned. Most frigs are too fragile to survive those huge fights with tons of fighters and other frigates all around, unless used with cautions officers, but then they lose so much firepower they become useless.
On another note, it could be nice if we had a post battle report at the same time as experience rewards about ship losses. I know you are told about those things in the tactical screens between after engagements but as it is usually filled with so much stuff, the info tends to be lost.
Last time I had what I thought a easy battle with no losses, but then became aware I had lost my Eagle XIV in the fight, which I was sad about granted its rarity.