Point defence weapons are not anti fighter weapons. PD weapons are anti-missile, many non-PD weapons are good antifighter weapons like Pulse Laser, Railgun and all the beam weapons. Against bombers, large ballistic turreted weapons do well against them.
Well the reason you equip PD weapons is to deal with ordnance that gets close, which fighters are going to bring. You either want to shoot down their torps or blow them up directly, for which some PD is incidentally decent. While small and midsize weapons are good at knocking out fighters, it's AREA weapons that are intuitively meant to be the answer to swarms. You don't use a slingshot on a swarm of mosquitoes; you get the bug spray. Fighters are fast; far faster than most frigates; ballistics can only keep up with so many. There's plenty of room for PD weapons to also serve as fighter deterrents and I feel like flak ought to be the premier anti-air weapon. It just feels purposely terrible, like it's TRYING not to hit its targets; I think just trimming off a wee bit of the delta of randomness on its detonation might close the gap on fighter swarms a bit without ruining everything else.
I mean think about it. Why are swarms even a problem in the first place? Because current defense weapons can generally only hit one at a time. We have to rely on our offensive weaponry like autopulsers, ballistics and missiles to combat them, none of which have anything resembling reliable area damage. Flak and its cousins wouldn't even need a damage buff or HE type, either; just a little reliability on WHERE they pop. At the very least it would make flak weapons worth the ordnance points, whereas now they're an auto-sell for me.
