The combat tree is perfectly fine for a SO heavy playstyle centered around Medusa and Aurora. And its not the "common" options of the combat tree that are usually taken for that.
Why would you ever SO a Medusa? It is fast enough that most enemy ships can't really threaten it, phase skim allows for easy venting pauses on demand, 2 Railguns are far below normal flux dissipation anyway... Basically, there isn't much to gain, but you lose ton of CR.
SO Aurora may be barely capable of solo defeating weaker Paragon variants (where non-SO can't at all), but it's kind of moot point with Afflictor doing so much better job for way less cost.
Because you cannot run heavy blasters consistently without SO. And Heavy blasters are
that good. And i don't mean that in a sarcastic way. They're really that good. Their cap efficiency isn't that great vs shields but that doesn't matter that much when you have SO because you can stack so much hard cap so fast while you dissipate the difference. Their DPS vs armor is second only to HIL's and Plasma Cannons and tied with Hellbore Cannons*, and its DPS vs hull is second only to Plasma Cannons. Edit: And its more flux efficient than Plasma Cannons.
The additional 80 speed you get is just
gravy. OK actually its pretty essential to easily slaughtering everything that gets in your way because it ensures that nothing can easily kite you and lets you move between targets super fast.
SO Medusa will easily and speedily solo most sub cruiser fleets until the enemy has very significant fighter coverage. The SO aurora will solo almost all pirate fleets and can get pretty close to soloing some of the mid-late game IBB fleets. Its not just about what you can solo but about how much chaff you can clear out and how fast. It is much faster, safer, and cheaper(in terms of ease of acquiring equipment) to rely on a player piloted SO Medusa than it is to try with an Afflictor.
*You need to get to armor values higher than what you will reasonably see in game in order for Hellbore to clearly win out. While HB is better against low armor targets they're pretty close in the heavy to medium relevant range where you particularly care about armor piercing. The variance tends to occur due to the long fire time on HB which means that, if you're close to a 1 or 2 hit armor kill it will be "clearly better" but if you're in the middle then HB's will be. Antimatter Cannons also can have the same advantage (basically the zero time advantage on first shot makes it penetrate some armor values faster) but HB's still dominate them in killing targets.