I think all the Carrier Caps got overbuffed when all they needed were tiny tweaks. Skirantra kiting might be the most egregious offender now, closely followed by the Halcyon, but even the Sova is devastating if it forces you to fight on its ground. A double Sova rush at your HW early game can be crippling. Carrier Caps were still valuable for their abilities before the buffs.
I don't think overall balance is as terrible as people make it out to be, but it can certainly feel that way when you are on the receiving end of the current optimal killer strategy (Early Carrier Cap Rushing). I kind of liked it back when strikecraft were stronger because I felt like they countered LRF and gave LF more of a role as Carrier hunters. Even back then when flak was less effective I sometimes made flak fleets to utterly confound people who were mindlessly spamming carriers to show it could be countered. As it stands, LRM are king again, except Advent are missing out a bit because the Illuminator bug fix in conjunction with previous balance tweaks to the Illum have made them a bit weaker than they need to be to match enemy LRF fleets.
When I was playing a bit back in the fall I did fairly well with TEC against experienced players. I chased off Skirantra with massed LRM early game, repaired with Hoshikos mid game, and in the cases where the Vasari dug in with starbases, I fragged their valuable economic worlds with Novaliths BEFORE the late game Vasari technologies could be implemented to kill me. If the Vasari has to spend money to build big fatty starbases to hold off your fleet, you will get to implement your sub par endgame before they can and you just have to brute force them with your disposable ships and superior economy. If the Vasari have end game technologies and a bigger fleet and have you on the defensive, well...then you are losing and have been for a while...Sins is one of those games where sometimes people have been losing for an hour and they just don't know it yet (thanks Entrenchment 
).
Advent need a little something though. They can still resist early game LRF rushes with scouts if they are in a pinch so that isn't an issue, but their weaker Illuminator puts them at a disadvantage trying to resist Carrier Cap rushes. They could also use a more effective Domina Subjugator
I was in that game. Blair (the dev) went lums (when they were still bugged) against Cykur and Cykur completely killed all the lums by kiting his carries (pre speed nerf of the carriers with single sc only). This resulted in Blair reducing the speed for all carriers next patch
Yes, I kited Blair (I am pretty sure he was Vasari though, I recall kiting his Assailants to death.) Carrier kiting was a sucky strategy and needed nerfing. (This is just trivia, has no relevance to current balance.)
Anyhow, I see some harsh comments, and I think it is a little unfair to the devs ... I don't think of Sins as a broken game, I think a ton of patches went into it and it is a lot better than it was at launch. I was not as excited about how hard it got to kill people after Entrenchment because games could really be drawn out, but you can't argue with how much Entrenchment added to single player. The major thing the multiplayer community really needed was the ability to distribute maps or mods via the launch platform so it wasn't so prohibitively painful to get people to try a mod. With that in place, multiplayer gamers could have managed their own balance.
