I’ve been a big proponent of adding a flight deck + 15 OP to the Eagle but the thread has me thinking about something sort of fundamental brought up earlier: why does the Eagle need to be slow? Why can’t it straight up be better than the Falcon? I.e. make it like 75 base speed with Maneuvering Jets?
I think it boils down again whether Alex wants Eagle to be a better support, or become a generalist again. I'm more inclined to believe the latter. It's not just a matter of feeling good in players hands, they will have to feel good to fight against. Judging by the screenshots in the blog posts, neither SD nor Hegs are fielding Eradicators or Champions, both are fielding Eagles and Falcons*.
I don't think a supportive Eagle would cut it in either of those fleets. It would be a dead weight in Hegemony fleets, where support duty is relegated to small ships and the big ones do the killing.
They would also suck in SD fleets, because they will need the cruisers to be the anchors, since the rest of their fleets is comparatively squishy (especially Executors).
They would be probably fine as anchors in the SD fleets, but they would need to rely on smaller ships and Executors to do damage for them. Contrast Persean League, which seems to be losing its Eagles and Falcons for Champions, which are unarguably the best line ships in the current game, their capitals are also not as squishy as SD's (Pegassi won't have to worry about having enough
blood flux for the Big D Energy weapons).
At this point I have a feeling that Eagle just needs the speed to punch down effectively. Falcon is probably going to get relegated to medium fleet Shrike duty, but it seems to be efficient enough to shine in it. As much as a semi-carrier supportive cruiser seems cool, no need to sacrifice the real Eagle for that. Besides, Venture and Colossus Mk. III already fill this role if you squint hard enough.
*missing from the Heg screenshot, but I doubt they'll be missing from the fleetsedit