I'm not sure where 48 is coming from. If I have 240 points, and my ships go from costing 20 to 16 (20*0.8 ), I go from 12 to 15 ships on the field. 15*20 = 300. So I'm curious, is it necessary for a player to get a full +60 DP bonus, for the skill to be worth a skill point? Having not played around with uneven deployments all that much, I'm not actually sure. It seems really strong to me though.
Is being able to deploy, say, 255 (+15 DP) already a sufficient benefit for a tier 5? +15 would be like a straight up 6% fleet strength buff, plus additional skills on more ships. A 25% overall fleet strength buff 60/240) for 1 skill point (even as a tier 5) sounds like too much. I don't think any of the other tier 5s really come close to that, do they?
As a more concrete example, I could imagine an 8 officer build (with the +1 to officer level skill) running 9 Furies (8+player), for 180 DP, then still having 60 DP more for frigates without officers. That would be an example of Thaago's "wide" build. I feel going from 7 Scarab/Tempests to 10 is a non-trivial bump, plus also adding peak performance and speed to each of those frigates is a non-trivial bonus. All it takes is a little bit of out numbering for the AI the start having problems with being able to back off and vent.
How much a fleet multiplier would one expect from a tier 5 skill, and how does that compare to the currently existing ones? Neural Link is like +1 officer. That's maybe a 12% increase in officered ships, which doesn't quite translate to raw fleet power? Automated ships perhaps gets you a 60 DP ship really worth, say, 75? A Radiant certainly isn't worth 100 DP, for example. Best of the Best is perhaps an 8% OP buff (imagine 315 OP capital, getting two s-mods worth 30, then another worth 30, so 30/375 = 0.08), which doesn't equate to a raw 25% stronger fleet. Hull Restoration is +10 to +15% CR, so a +5% multiplier perhaps? Derelict operations is a bit harder to estimate since you need to include a bunch of d-mods decreasing individual ship effectiveness.