i'm not sold to be honest
the chief problems with carriers (and fighters) were:
-PD weapons too cheap and too effective
-ranges far too short compared to PD weapons
-fighters too weak, too slow, do not do enough damage (some of all three)
-far more cost (monetary and deployment) required by fighters than just bringing anything else
among others. removing any real fine management from carriers as a platform (no rally point, what?) and slaving them directly to carriers (which i don't care about i guess) isn't going to make them any better. they still don't scale, they still don't do much damage, they're still too weak, too few, too slow etc
did you change any of that? i don't really get all this talk of "support weapon".. there's no electronic warfare modelled in the game so how is any weapon a "support weapon"? by definition you kill the enemy with a weapon, and if it's substandard at killing the enemy it's a bad weapon, not a support weapon.
now if you were going to change them into actually well distinguished strike / interception / space control / EW platforms then they could be a support weapon, but that isn't exactly what they are now, or is it?
as it is, the only way to use the new fighters to any great effectiveness will be to deathball the carriers up so they all attack the same target, which neglects the whole point of carriers in the first place: that they're capable of pooling their resources across a wide front and striking the enemy's weakest point. i mean, all strategy has essentially been removed with the removal of rally point; where before you could exploit the slow-turning battleship's shield arc, form up a wall of strike wings on it's side and run in with a wall of deadly torpedoes, now the AI will just dive into it's frontal shield. having to have the carrier physically flank the battleship (something which won't even be possible half the time, due to the battleship's friends and fighters shooting you to death as you try) doesn't even make sense.
i hope my doubts are assuaged when the patch comes out, but this was not the direction i had hoped for to be quite honest. what i hoped for was that fighters would get more fighter-y, not less. removing 90% of the stuff that made them unique and turning them into what are essentially point defense drones was not what i was after. i'm not sure what all the "fighters require too much micro" complaints are about. they require 10 keypresses in the heaviest of battles:
-rally carrier
-strike force waypoint
-wait till they're assembled in a minute or two
-strike
-^repeat strike a few times
if you don't like clicking a few buttons to shepherd your fighters, you don't have to. but personally i kind of liked it.