...Carriers are just more exacerbated in that their best guns, fighters, also happen to be flux free and of great range, so you lose little by spending all your OP on making fighters perform as good as possible. The easiest way of making carriers play and fit more like other ships is to make fighters use the carrier's flux in some way, but I don't expect this to happen. Or fighters could be nerfed so much, they are worse than even the worst of guns, so there would be no incentive to use them instead of actual guns. This sort of happened, but instead of players choosing guns over fighters on their carriers, they choose warships over carriers in their fleets.
Dedicated carriers sort of pay for their fighters with inferior stats and mounts. So does Gryphon for their extra missiles, and most hybrid freighters for their greater cargo capacities.
I would not want fighters using flux unless carriers' stats were upgraded to full-blown warships of their weight class (barring obvious exceptions). I agree that making fighters too weak means players will dump them for warships. (I did during this release and all of the 0.7x era.) After all, if all fighters do is die then trickle in as a non-threat for the rest of the fight, then all the player is left with is a gimped warship at best or a freighter (that hauls fighters) at worst.
During 0.6, no one had skills except the fleet commander, and carriers and fighters were more-or-less as viable as anything else. Then came 0.7 with officers, and fleets had up to eleven people with skills, and skilled warships blew carriers and fighters out of the water. Then 0.8 came with redone carriers with carrier hullmods, powerful carrier skills, and overpowered Talons, Sparks, Lux, and Warthogs. Carrier skills and fighters have been nerfed steadily (but later, the Perdition wing was added and it was overpowered in the first release it appeared in). Some, like Warthogs were overnerfed, while Sparks remained overpowered when spammed even after the nerf (until a further nerf in 0.95). This latest release, nerfed carrier skills (or simply made them impossible to take if player wanted other competing skills to take) and nerfed Drover, various fighters, and Expanded Deck Crew. If you do not take a certain skill path, your carriers will be unskilled like in 0.7x, and your only boost is Expanded Deck Crew, which was nerfed too.
In the end, carriers are probably at their worst as they ever been. Fighter power is about as weak as they were in 0.7, but now player cannot command fighters to do fun things like capture points, search for enemies hiding behind fog-of-war, or simply deploy them without the carrier. To add insult to injury, this is with carriers min-maxing their loadouts for fighter use, with almost no guns. At least 0.7x carriers could use guns (because OP could only be spent on warship stuff or campaign QoL), which were not enough when fighters died out after the first minute or two of a fifteen minute or longer battle.
