Hmm, I'm not connecting the dots here. More specifically, how will going back to fighters-as-ships solve spam?
You cannot bring or deploy as many carriers and fighters, if fighters are like ships. If you want fighter spam with fighters-as-ships, that will be your entire fleet (not two-thirds of your fleet plus the rest other ships of your choice). With 30 slots, the most fighter power the player can bring is a single Drover, twenty-something Sparks, and some logistics ships to feed the swarm. With current fighters-as-weapons, player can deploy twenty Drover and forty Sparks and sweep multi-Ordos fights as shown by goduranus.
Yes, fighters-as-ships ate supplies too.
I am not going to lie. I like classic armed carriers being used like a battlestar, and I am annoyed that fighters-as-weapons have mostly killed such carriers as a good option.
- No actual range limits on wings. (So in reality spam gets worse not better)
That is a point of using fighters. I would say it is a good thing.
- Players could operate large numbers of fighters with a single carrier on the field since wings weren't tied to the carrier in any way.
While possible that was not a good idea because most of the wings would be eliminated. However, it would be possible to steadily deploy a trickle of wings, although that is not much different than deploying more frigates. The advantage in some releases was fighters were effectively auto-recovered as long as the carrier was alive, which was a big deal when ships and weapons were much harder to find or replace.
- From the opponent's perspective - the only way to actually stop a particularly dangerous bomber was to kill every carrier on the field.
An easier way would be to kill a bunch of fighters so fast that some wings were destroyed and kicked out of the fight. If it is a single wing, yeah, it could be hard to kill, although at that point, it is probably a minor threat.
- No visual of seeing wings deploy in the beginning of battle. (Its fluff but it was suggested many many times before the rework)
You do not see anything deploy in the beginning of battle ever since the name change from Starfarer to Starsector, but the AI sees what you deploy. You can get blindsided by everything, from fighters to Onslaught burning in from the side with both TPCs and Annihilators blazing. Meanwhile, AI deploys ships after you deploy. If anything, this is the case of "AI is a cheater" trope.
- A case could be made to never deploy the carrier on the field - only wings - in order to limit the supply drain from losses.
This is a good thing, and I miss this after the 0.8a release! This is like the fiction of X-wings operating solo, or Colonial Vipers and Cylon Raiders having dogfights far from their mothership (Battlestar Galactica and Cylon basestar or outpost). In Starsector, the disadvantage of doing this is if the wing was wiped out, they were kicked out of the fight. However, it was fun deploying only fighters to mop up pursuits. Made my Odyssey feel like Battlestar Galactica sending out Vipers to take out the Cylons. A case where fighters-as-ships win.
- Absolutely no thought was needed when choosing what wings to bring. You just brought the best ones and paid a supply/day penalty if you went over hangar space iirc. If you are operating carriers you better not care about supplies.
Almost no different than post-0.8a, when I would bring Sparks (or Warthogs in 0.8.1a) for non-bombers, and bombers are some combo of Longbow/Khopesh/Cobra/Dagger. Only difference is the best fighters today eat too much OP and (combined with Expanded Deck Crew which eats more OP) we have unarmed carriers being the best carrier. If anything, fighters-as-ships win here because it did not gut carrier loadouts. (It cost fleet resources, not carrier's OP.)
- The ship cap would have to be removed or changed because wings would count as ships towards to cap - and clutter up the fleet screen because there is no real need to look at them but they are still there.
During 0.7a, 25 ships was too low a cap, but 30 is tolerable as long as the enemy does not violate that cap (which it blatantly did until 0.9.1a, and now we get capital spam instead of the hundred frigate horde). During 0.65a, with the way Logistics worked, fleet cap was effectively 40 for frigates (and much less for bigger ships). I do not see a need to mess with the ship cap much, although I would not mind a slightly higher cap, since the enemy loves to spam several capitals and a bunch of cruisers in each endgame fight. If fleet cap is too low for fighters as ships, it is too low for everything else.