So I got very lucky on my first 0.9.1 vanilla run.
The second cluster I explored for bounty hunting, right next to the core worlds, had two good planets for colonization and several stations including a research station. And here I got a Paragon blueprint right at the start of the game. What to do?
Sell it to the Pirates to jump-start two colonies of course!
I had already made good starting money by smuggling supplies and heavy armaments to Qaras and I found it fitting to continue my opportunistic anarchistic tendencies. It was very much a conscious decision, I wanted a challenge and was bored of the constant boring pirate grind from 0.9. Also the thought of Paragon pirate fleets was hilarious, especially from a lore perspective.
It was't as funny though when the FIRST pirate fleet to raid my undefended colonies looked like this while my fleet consisted of only a falcon and a few destroyers and frigates:
Turned out that it wasn't as bad as it looked. They had a Paragon but only had access to their very limited energy weapon selection. So with only 2 autopulse lasers it wasn't really a threat and got swarmed and killed eventually.