Centurion isn't the most exciting ship, even though it does fill an unexplored niche and is ridiculously hard to kill for a frigate. I can see the overarching idea behind it, but the end result is that you'll probably outfit it as a long range tac laser/gyro/ipdai ship/burst laser platform almost every time, unless it's at the very start of the game. Need to test more though, it might be a funny unflankable point capping ship with a set of long-range ballistics on it, or as a "tank" with an aggressive officer to generate flanking opportunities.
What's the deal with the missile power creep, by the way? Missiles offer lower TTK and a higher degree of randomness than a few years back, and most patches have continued the trend in some way, although the Locust and Squall are good. (is the squall supposed to have 750 proj HP?)
Missile Specialization is the biggest culprit, but there are a few other changes too. The new Atropos isn't really fun to deal with, and it feels fairly brainless to use. If the enemy fleet has a few, you basically can't overload near those ships ever, or you die, forcing you to play extremely cautiously. This was already the case thanks to Harpoons and missile specialization, but now there's an added dimension to it. They're thankfully quite rare in vanilla, but I find it tedious. I wonder if the idea of a homing torpedo is inherently flawed. Torpedoes are supposed to pack enough punch to threaten bigger ships, so PD resistance and raw damage is their chief asset over MRMs. A fast, homing torpedo turns it into an asymmetrical weapon that favors top-down engagements, instead of being an equalizer, because the toughest ships aren't hard to hit in the first place. To put it bluntly, I feel like the Atropos doesn't really need to exist at all.
Harpoons have become better against frigates over time. Frigates like to use Harpoons as equalizers against bigger ships. Bigger ships can never dodge harpoons reliably anymore due to the veering, but even frigates can struggle due to the fact harpoons will flip around and accelerate back if they miss on the first run. Maybe harpoons should commit more to their heading and instead try to predict based on the target's current vector, so that a frigate that reads the incoming missile's projected hit location can pull off a last-minute dodge, and to make the initial firing position more important.
The best defense against missiles is to crush the enemy ship(s) so hard that you're never vulnerable in the first place. Counting on reacting to the missiles is unreliable (or impossible if given missile spec), unless you're already playing extremely defensively. The harder it is to minimize the impact of being punished by missiles (for either side) the more binary Starsector becomes and the more important it is to only choose asymmetrical engagements that are in your favor. And a lot of the time, you can just fire Harpoons indiscriminately to remove threats anyway, the concept of "punishment" or situational use has become a bit blurred. It's a tricky balance, because you would never use a missile with 3 ammo if you can't reliably gain anything from firing them.
The redesigned Hurricane MIRV is also not very interesting. It tends to mostly ignore PD except for flak, leaving you shielding the submunitions until the ship runs out of ammo, because it's too risky to engage while it's still launching them unless you vastly overpower the enemy. In the end, you just game the ammo out, and if you can't, you'll probably get punished hard for it. Might be a side effect of how liberally the AI uses the weapon.