I haven't had too much trouble clearing Remnant Ordos, but my strategy heavily leans on phase ship cheese and on the player personally destroying like half the enemy fleet, whereas in previous versions of the game I didn't feel nearly so pressured to optimize and use the most broken ships in the game, nor did I have to do so much of the work myself.
Fortunately I'm pretty sure AI officer counts are getting toned down in the next patch anyways.
Also, the whole idea that the player would spend story points to add mercenary officers to their fleet for just one year seems very naive when you compare it to all the permanent upgrades that story points can buy, and how scarce they are at endgame. It's a total non-starter, especially since the main problem with enemy officer counts isn't even really the DP difference, but the war for ECM supremacy -- which can be solved by adding the ECM hull mod to your ships, ideally with a story point. Why go for a temporary fix like mercs when you can go for a permanent one?