I wonder if part of it is once a ship's shields are down or it's overloaded, it's weapons are no longer firing being disabled, it feels more like a chore than a fight, despite perhaps taking an equal amount of time compared to a more mobile and/or shielded enemy. It's like the Monitor - next to impossible to kill, but unable to actually do any harm, and thus can be considered annoying in the opposing fleet.
Someone suggested disabled weapons still being able to fire at half rate or whatever. I think that would help a lot both for fighting tough ships and to make it suck less when your own weapons get disabled.
Engines could probably do with a similar thing - flamed out ships still having a few engines.
prey did this, had weapon durability but when your weapon's reaches 0 it doesn't break, it just jams every time you fire it after it fires, turning all guns into single-shot manually operated guns.
which i really, really, really liked.
i could see SS rotating something similar onto itself; instead of weapons getting disabled or engines flamed out by enemy damage (barring catastrophic hits), they get put into an "unstable" state. Using an unstable weapon causes it to become disabled temporarily, & using an unstable engine causes it to flame out after a delay. So instead of being rendered unable to do things by the enemy's actions -- which can be not-great, you are rendered only able to do 1 thing by the enemy's actions -- which can be compelling. In a sort of, having to make a leap of faith by picking a direction u think ur gonna want to be going for the next 4-12 seconds & giving it a burn until the engines flame out leaving u coasting in the direction u picked, kind of way.
So instead of taking a stray shot to the aft while approaching an enemy Onslaught in ur frigate causing you guarenteed death, that shot to the engines instead leaves your engines unstable, allowing you to use what gas is left in the burner to try & halt your approach & leave yourself coasting
away from the gigantic death-monster instead of towards like u were when u took the hit
The lack of Energy missiles in the game is...disturbing. Just sayin' 
You really could go wild with them: disablers, slow-moving death balls, chain-effects...the sky is the limit. Even more traditional Energy missiles pose an interesting dilemma: a 2000 damage Energy missile is a moderate hit against both shields and hull but if it also was an Ion hit, I really don't want to get disabled! At least something like that would give the Sabot some competition: depending on ammo, OP, etc.
In my experience from playing with mods torpedoes with an energy damage type are very difficult from a balance perspective because large shot size energy has no weaknesses, and torpedoes are by nature very large impacts. Something like a 2000 damage energy missile will strip the armor of cruisers in a single shot: the only effective defense against them is shields, no ship in the game wants to take that kind of hit to armor! But they do double the damage the damage vs shields than an HE torpedo does, so blocking them with shields is half as effective.
plus any energy torpedo that does have its damage balanced against its utility winds up feeling really bad as a torpedo. Energy torps have 2 textures to them; they hit way too hard for what they are, or they hit way too not-hard for what they are. The sort of damage alpha that a torpedo calls for doesn't work well with universal damage type. It's best to specialize them so u have an excuse to make them heinous.
What
I really want to see is a frag torpedo. A lot of missiles are listed as finishers but I want to see
a finisher; a MIRV full of cluster bombs that doesn't start firing until after it's entered an enemy ship (as in, it doesn't "impact" like a normal missile, it flies thru the ship like a fighter but invisible to the player as it does, dealing damage (which the player can see in the form of explosions) as it goes & "impacts" the armor on the far side of the ship when it attempts to exit the target & blows up instead of overshooting. The sort of thing you can sink into an Onslaught thru a gap in its armor & watch it get hollowed out. The sort of thing that turns a flamed-out Hound into a cloud of dust & echoing screams
