The problem with beam weapons that I see is that on paper they are good for pressuring an opponent. But in practice, with real shield efficiency values, that is almost never the case. In the actual game environment, especially now with officer spam, the actual threats to the player never have shields at 1.0 efficiency, that beingthe value most people cite who think they are good pressure tools. Most revenant ships have better than .5 with skills, even midline ships easily beat 1.0. At values like those, killing an enemy through soft Flux or even giving him pause with it is impossible. A pressure tool for the enemy now builds up substantially more Flux on you than then them. For beam weapons to be worth the far worse dps and lack of hard Flux they need to be able to give you some kind of an advantage... and I suppose that might bring up the thought; "hey, so what? All weapons have to deal with better shields too." The main difference is that they still inflict hard Flux. Being inefficient against enemy soft Flux is worse than doing nothing at all.
If I had to present a solution, I would change beams into complete pressure weapons, starting out very, very weak and inefficient at first, but over the course of 5 to 10 seconds of direct burn becoming more and more efficient and deadly. That or a quick fix of making them actually doing something against armor, which only the high intensity laser can do at the moment, and that has the disadvantage of being even WORSE against shields, if that's even possible.