The one suggestion that I have is you could consider moving to a smaller ship rather than trying to pilot your best ship. That may steepen the learning curve to becoming an ace pilot, but it will also greatly decrease the costs in time and credits if your fleet isn't depending upon your personal heroics to win. Moreover, once you do graduate and are ready to fly a capital ship, the game will sure seem a lot easier if you've cut your teeth on a lighter class.
It may not even be necessary. I continue to fly a particular frigate for everything except a couple of end game encounters, and I can swing fights for just a few DP. That means I don't carry around a penalty to my soft caps skills for when I don't want to fly manually (which is most of the time). I only pull out my Omen when I'm disadvantaged or bored.
Yes, I can decisively swing fights flying an Omen, which means the player isn't exclusively relegated to the hard carry role. You can also play high level support with control either by disabling key ships, like my Omen, or by kiting--or even using missile spam--to split up the enemy fleet in such a way that the rest of your fleet enjoys tactical superiority. Most people use missile spam to kill the enemy, but as has been mentioned prior in this thread, the AI is pretty dumb when it comes to handling missiles, so you could also use them to potentially control a few dangerous ships by pinning them in their deployment zone, while your fleet cleans up everything else.
Of course, I suspect most people would prefer charging in and being super hero to cravenly kiting enemies around; however in the mod I play most often, the Redacted are significantly more deadly than vanilla and I'm not opposed to limited shenanigans in the early mid-game to field some of their ships and cut out a lot of the grind.
