Don't like SO so didn't bother with such builds.
Fair enough, certainly I'd expect the ship to be worth the points with or without safety overrides. I will note, SO does play to the strengths of the Fury more than say, an Eradicator, so I tend to think it gets more mileage out of it than most low or mid-tech ships. Plasma burn + SO means you can't be kited all day by an ion beam Wolf or Tempest, unlike most other SO cruisers (Eradicator included).
I'm sure if you min max enough for a certain fight you can beat it with a lot of mono fleets, but I'm not sure if that's a valid argument for game balance.
That brings up the age old question, what is a valid argument for game balance? As you noted, the DP cost is meaningless for early campaign, it's just a few supplies here and there. It only matter at the 240 DP fleet limit. So what am I usually fighting when I've amassed a full 240 DP fleet? Ordos, Doritos, and end game bounties. How do I test just the Fury effectiveness with as few other confounding factors? Just use Furies, aka a mono-fleet.
Perhaps there's a better metric, and I'd love to hear other testing methodologies. General experience feedback is obviously valuable, but it's hard to place in context given it is presumably with a specific loadout (or set of loadouts) in a specific fleet composition played in a certain way.
As for weapon choices, my philosophy of medium energy weapons goes something like this:
I consider Pulse Lasers to be primarily for frigates (it's almost literally 2 IR pulse lasers). Phase lance is mostly a secondary weapon for swatting fighters, or on a ship like the Harbinger that can bypass shields in some way. On AI ships I tend to see it get dumped into shields way too often, and it's not a continuous pressure weapon, so AI mistakes hurt. Graviton and Ion Beams are long range support soft flux weapons, which again isn't great for actually killing things as the primary weapon (unless your entire fleet is doing beam spam, plus I can get 2 Ion beams at no slot and flux cost for 42 OP, or 27 with s-mod). Heavy Burst PD is mostly PD, although some anti-armor. Ion Pulsars (which combine Ion damage with 900 energy burst DPS) are great for bursting down frigates/destroyer shields, while having Ion utility against cruisers and battleships. I consider Heavy Blasters to be 2/3's of a Plasma Cannon DPS and all of it's armor penetration, in a medium mount for 2/5 of the OP cost. I'm discounting mining blasters as those are either pirate weapons or niche Harbinger builds.
So if I'm running a full fleet late game, my Auroras and Furies are going to be fit with Heavy Blasters and sometimes an Ion Pulser mixed in. And then sabots. Its admittedly a bit monotone in weapon selection, but there really are only two hard flux medium energy mounts to consider for cruisers as primary DPS.
63 OP for 1 Heavy Blaster, 1 Ion Pulsar, 1 Sabot Pod, and 30 Vents would be my starting point for a non-SO, non-converted hangar build. 900 flux/second sustained matches dissipation, and has 680 sustained DPS, 9800 energy damage burst over 7 seconds. That burst will crumple almost all* frigate shields.
*depends on whether you consider Hyperions to be "frigates" or cruisers in frigate clothing.