CanaldoVoid, I think your doctrine is just really unusual and not used by most players. You kite hard with stacked beam weapons yes? This sort of style is going to be really effective against Low Tech ships, which are lacking in dissipation and will not be able to catch faster ships with longer range. This is probably part of why you feel the way you do. It's a cool doctrine though, and it's neat to see all the ways people play the game.
I usually fit a lot of LRPD Lasers or PD Lasers on my ships, as they are fairly flux efficient and are usually good to shoot at enemies in addition to shooting down fighters and missiles. LRPD Lasers can also be used to provide point defense for allied ships as well, which is quite helpful.
I usually won't fit stuff like Single or Dual Autocannons on ships, but this is more because their ranges do not match up with the larger weapon ranges rather than the weapons themselves being ineffective. I generally like Light Machine Guns a lot though, and personally prefer them to Vulcans because of their longer reach and ability to pressure shields extremely well at close ranges. I usually don't use much ballistic PD outside of Flak Cannons though. Light Mortars are notably extremely efficient HE weapons and can be very effective on a number of ships. Fitting a Hammerhead with two Light Mortars and two medium kinetic weapons can be quite effective.
I've not killed any real late game enemies recently, at least not with vanilla stuff, but there was that time I faced down a few small groups of Remnants with just Hounds and won without any losses. Lots of hull and armor damage though.
I see, that would make sense, it's just weird that the few posters I've been seeing in the same topics all over the forum seem to use this same playing style which seems to be completely different from every reddit post, discussion, every social media, every fb group, every discord group and every gameplay video/let's play series I've ever seen about Starsector.
But out of curiosity, I was reading Rusty's guide to AI friendly ships and I couldn't help but to notice his onslaught design is basically identical to mine, save for a few differences (IE: I don't downsize the dev cannons as I want it covering the entire fleet as a nuking PD platform that basically takes care of everyone else) but the rest is basically the same, long range railguns matching it's own natural weapon's range, possibly a helbore (heph sucks), 3 annihilators to make the enemy's PD go nutts wasting tons of flux and..... Nearly every, or just every small slot empty.
It's like I've been arguing defending a point that's just common sense all this time when guides are doing exactly what I'm pointing out to be a problem, possibly for the same exact reasons.
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Some notes for that Onslaught build:
a) it was designed in a skill-less 0.9.1a scenario. The equivalent in 0.95a has 30-60 more OP thanks to s-mods.
b) even for 0.9.1a it's slightly outdated and I started playing around with using IPDAI small weapons in the rear to better handle flanking ships
c) the increased ease of obtaining the Point Defense skill in 0.95a significantly improves Vulcan spam and this build would probably not look the same in light of that.
d) other players sometimes differ with me on this but the main drawback to using small non-PD weapons in these slots is a lack of range matching. This is less of an issue on smaller ships and hence small weapons are more prevalent there.
e) Annihilators that hit have a much higher flux cost than Annihilators that are stopped by PD, so you have it a bit backwards there.
Anyhow, small weapons are good enough on the ships that regularly use them that I don't see much onus for changes as drastic as those you're suggesting. Alex has been giving them minor touch-ups recently which I tend to agree with however, so I suppose it's not a wholly irredeemable opinion.
