I think fighter buffs should be treated like buffs to ships. Just put them into various skills. Having fighter bonuses be the elite part of the skill means that the issue the current carriers have (there's like 3 skills for them) expands the choice marginally (3 skills + 1/2/3 elite picks that may or may not be the same as those 3 base skills) and may or may not be enough for them.
Carriers already sort of are pushed towards either of two extremes: Support Doctrine and/or Derelict Operations spam, or officered carriers (which are naturally limited to mostly 10). I think their competitiveness is best highlighted by how rarely carriers are mentioned in extreme compositions (vs 5 ordo or the like). Sure, fighters mayhaps don't need to be
the most meta, but is their current power level enough for casual players? Looking at various examples of fleet screenshots, it appears the majority of them use 0 or 1 carriers in their fleet. If they do field carriers, they tend to be battlecarriers (Mora, Legion). Pure carriers don't seem to be popular. One of the more interesting things I saw was that even fleets with carriers don't tend to get the carrier skills.
What I would like to see is for most skills to gain fighter bonuses, whether as a part of the base skill, or as an elite. My picks would be...
Spoiler
Impact Mitigation: -50% damage received to weapons and engines (I think fighter weapons are invulnerable in the first place, but the engine part is important).
Damage Control: 50% faster weapon and engine repair (ditto).
elite Field Modulation: -50% overload duration (it's really annoying when a bomber gets overloaded and it won't fire its payload...).
elite Targeting Analysis: +100% damage dealt to weapons and engines.
Ballistic Mastery and Energy Weapons Mastery: I'm torn on these. On one hand, any fighter bonuses would encourage sticking to certain fighters, but on the other hand, maybe that's okay? I'm not sure. If I had to give fighters bonuses here, I would make them get +5% damage dealt by ballistic/energy weapons.
Tactical Drills: +5% damage.
Gunnery Implants: +10% fighter turn rate or something like that.
Flux Regulation: +10% flux capacity and dissipation (this is practically a 10% damage buff for non-bombers!).
For the rest of the skills:
Spoiler
Helmsmanship already benefits carriers enough not to warrant a fighter bonus
Combat Endurance already benefits fighters.
Point Defence already benefits fighters.
System Expertise can benefit fighters, if the carrier has a fighter-boosting system.
Missile Specialisation doesn't benefit fighters, but missiles can make a carrier useful despite or in addition to its fighters.
Coordinated Manoeuvres iirc already benefit fighters.
Wolfpack Tactics shouldn't affect fighters anyway.
Crew Training already benefits fighters.
Carrier Group already benefits fighters.
Fighter Uplink already benefits fighters... but it's a terrible skill.
Officer skills currently benefit warships more, because so do regular skills, but in this hypothetical scenario this would change.
Best of the Best and Support Doctrine don't discriminate against carriers.
Electronic Warfare affects carriers already.
Phase Coil Tuning shouldn't affect fighters anyway.
Neural Link doesn't discriminate against fighters.
I don't know if Cybernetic Augmentation benefits fighters.
Automated Ships doesn't buff any ships.
I don't know what bonuses could Ordnance Expertise and Polarised Armour get.
Hull Restoration and Derelict Operations don't discriminate against carriers.
Fighter Uplink needs a change. Fewer combat losses doesn't actually mean anything until combat ends. The target leading accuracy... I think it's a bit weird, because to me, all bonuses to target leading accuracy don't actually matter much, and it means this one doesn't matter, either. Maybe someone could pull up some example of what it actually does, because in my experience, AI target leading is always at least somewhat inaccurate for fast targets.