Well, nothing is stopping you from using your brain in Starsector.
You have Afflictor and Harbinger. Both are major "buff/debuff" assets. Very rewarding as a tactical-minded player controlled ships.
Honestly, I'm not even understand all that fuss about difficulty. The major rule of the naval combat is to not play by the rules of the strongest force. Because you can't win. That's all. For some reason, everybody decided to outdeploy the ai. What could possibly go wrong?..
If I have to use cheese and have all chocie taken away from me and outright use the most broken thing I can find and give up on everything else, then the game is poorly balanced. Saying "well if you use this AI exploit and this broken ship..." as an argument that it's balanced as if every other choice doesn't exist, is not a good argument.
At what point does optimization become choicelessness? You have a myriad amount of choices, but not every single choice is equal. Therefore some choices will be better then others. The problem is when there is only one successful path to success, because then there aren't really any choices. I disagree with the idea that there's only one way. I don't believe the harbinger is mandatory and have cleared the game without it because you can use the
instead. Though I feel having at least a couple frigates is almost mandatory now. They serve as an excellent distraction and have the speed to engage and disengage at leisure. Fights become much easier because the enemy devotes a disproportionate amount of ships to try to chase them down.
While you raise an interesting point that the AI doesn't have to worry about ships blown up the same way a player does, I feel it overlooks the fact that the AI has far less agency then the player. The player can assess and choose engagements: conversely, the AI is a static target or only engages on scripted events. The player is expected to have an accurate assessment of their own capabilities and relative capabilities of the enemy so they don't get their entire fleet blown up.
That being said, what is your fleet and what fights are you having trouble in that you feel should not be happening? Elite bounties? Random pirate fleets? [REDACTED]?