Uomoz: I too didn't like some aspects of v.0.54, but I hope there will be new updates where both sides of players will be satisfied.
Histidine: I appologize for missing answer by Alex. Will try to answer now.
About freighter example. There should be some game goal to use freighter fleet. Using it as a combat ship obviously is a bad idea. But even without quests, trading and other things - freighters still have value as a mean to sustain big fleet for a long time or bring back big catch. But it is not so good example overall because we don't have trading or any other system which utilizes freighters very well.
How I see this whole thing. CR certainly is capable of limiting such ships as Hyperion from being overused, or stops from using capitals against 2 fighter wings. Aside from how balanced CR tuning is now, instead of giving you an options when you can find different strategies to be CR effective equally (and so you will find that using Hyperion is beneficial, and also using lasher is beneficial, and also using Dominator is beneficial, but with slight accents on different situations), what I find is that I have few effective ways to play. And I have all other ways to play, but I will never try them except only for the sake of testing. I don't feel being rewarded for using this system, I don't feel being given new options to choose from. Instead I feel that I have to play only few efficient ways. For example Hyperion - I rarely used them earlier, because they cost alot and outside of small scale battles they are not that good as equally pricey ships. Now with CR penalties I don't even know if I should ever bother with such ships with great penalties.
In short I see how CR limited what should be limited (but I am still insisting that it needs alot of balancing), but I don't see how it expanded my gameplay experience. I don't believe that we will have many CR efficient ways to play.
If earlier we had no limits to use excessive force, we at the same time had no limits to try other strategies, tons of them. But with CR you are not only limiting strategies which you intended to limit, you limit alot of other strategies. There is no point in new stat if it makes your pool of viable choices smaller. It gives more factors to consider, but at the same time makes field of your options smaller. And the worst thing is that we don't have big variety if encounters. There are no any challenging situation with meaningfull reward to use specialized fleet of Hyperions, for example. (A little fantasy from me. If we had some special encounter where nebulas a ten times strong and ten times numerous, using Hyperion would be beneficial regardless of how questionable its use in other situation. Or encounter where cruisers and capitals can't be deployed. Or encounter where shield systems are down. And because we have no variety of encounters, with CR introduced we have even less strategies to use.)