I think it's actually embarrassing how weak the ship is, and even more embarrassing how people defend it. It's literally outperformed by a less than half as expensive generic phase ship, can easily be killed in it's full-power form with a single paragon, and imparts MASSIVE maluses for even daring to have it in one's fleet. This is the same kind of completely nonsensical overnerfing of the player in a single-player only game as capping AI ships to 30 deployment points without an officer, while seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that the paragon is more powerful than any of these supposedly "too overpowered" ships like the radiant and the exploratorium drone battleship (I could remember this one wrong, since it's been a while since I saw it). Not only that, it's a phase ship with a frail hull and mediocre armor. So what if it can mostly shut down a single ship? My radiant with a reality disruptor can do that, and it has the shields to not get shot to pieces by every other hostile around the targeted ship.
And to everyone justifying this with the "muh hypershunt guardians", this ship would get obliterated the second it drops it's phase, especially since there's 2 guardians. Not only that, it's ridiculous to imply you would need this ship to defeat them anyway. I did it with a single onslaught, a radiant, and a few cruisers, and it wasn't that hard. A paragon would be much more useful against the guardians for many reason, not least of which being that it's one of the only ships able to withstand a focused onslaught from them, as well as being able to support other ships and make disengaging very hard due to it's immense range. I had to actually make a forum account to post this, because apparently it's okay for a capital ship at the end of a long line of quests to be an actual detriment.
TL:DR:
The paragon is and has always been immensely overpowered for even it's deployment cost of 60 and I'm tired of pretending it's not, and even more tired of everyone acting like it doesn't exist when considering "balance."