I feel like balancing kind of inevitably ends up being a mix of both buffing and nerfing. If something is too weak, it gets buffed, if something is too strong, it gets nerfed, right. You could buff everything else instead of nerfing the strong thing, but then it's ... almost more of a redesign than a balancing pass, really, since it seems likely to change the feel of things quite a lot.
As far as fights taking a long time - I think a lot of that has to to with the number of capitals in enemy fleets, so that seems like something that should get toned down just naturally as a result of these changes. I'll keep an eye on that, though.