Exactly what I said in my original post: ECM is a single number that has more of an effect on how combat (especially combat between AI) turns out than any other factor.
When you win the ECM war, player piloting skill doesn't really matter, and good fittings don't really matter, because unless you screwed up catastrophically you're going to win effortlessly. And that's boring. It would be good if ECM mattered less, so that other things could matter more -- especially things that are more complicated than "get as much of this number as you can."
When you lose the ECM war then player skill matters a lot (because you can claw your advantage back by killing off enemy ships/officers) -- but that still diminishes the importance of fittings and fleet composition, which isn't good either.
It would be better if these things were more equal in importance, because then you're rewarded for learning
all of them, increasing the depth of the game and the time it takes to master it, and also making that mastery more rewarding. And it might even be better if those things were more important than ECM, because ECM is just "big number = better", while player piloting and fitting are both complex and involve a lot of decisions, trade-offs, and experience.
No. I was saying that right now people can no longer auto win. The most critic came in the "I'm always at -20% range disadvantage so nerf the ECM" form. Not the other way around. It happened to be too difficult to devise the particular set of skills and fleet composition to auto-win the ECM game.
If you're saying people can no longer auto-win, then you're simply wrong, because that's exactly what having +20% ECM does. It even does it for the exact same reason that the ITU used to -- range is really good and the AI doesn't understand hit-and-run tactics well enough to compensate for inferior range!