For me who has ePD and recoil reduction on most of the important ships that use ballistics, Devastator does everything I want from HAG and more, while having flux cost not much more than Hellbore. If I need high recoil reduction to give HAG acceptable accuracy, and I already have ePD, Devastator also has acceptable accuracy for assault, but the problem is range, unless I get ePD, in which case, the extra +200 range sends most shots to explode near max range of 900 range weapons.
My main problem with HAG is the meta - all endgame fights are against heavily shielded ships, and even against regular enemies anti-shield weapons are preferred to win the flux battle quicker, so in my builds every large ballistic mount automatically goes to a kinetic weapon(or in case of Conquest a Mjolnir) Explosive weapons are "support".
For me, it depends on the ship. I prefer a bunch of light kinetics with Rangefinder or ePD+IPDAI (because they have better accuracy and efficiency) and use heavier weapons for anti-armor (because they have better range or armor penetration).
Small kinetics have the almighty Railgun, although Light Needler is not too bad. Even mass LACs can be useful.
Medium kinetics is worse, mostly 700 range kinetics that only get +100 range from Rangefinder, and ePD+IPDAI does not work on these. HAC has awful accuracy (and turns slow).
Heavy kinetics has MarkIX (bad accuracy, less efficient than smaller kinetics), Storm Needler (terrible range), and Gauss (sniper weapon).
Small anti-armor has Light Mortar (slow, less range) and LAG (poor armor penetration, less efficient than kinetics)
Medium anti-armor has Heavy Mortar (slow, 700 range) and Heavy Mauler (long reload delay)
Heavy anti-armor has Hellbore (faster Mauler), HAG (inaccurate), Devastator (inaccurate, less effective range), and Mjolnir (inefficient, high flux cost). Onslaught has TPCs (fixed forward).
With that said, on some ships, the mounts may get beat up a bunch and heavy weapon can be better just by being harder to knock out than a light one, especially when enemies have skills that knock out weapons faster.
