1. You play at least at 2x-4x speed. It is your decision, not envisioned to be default. You put yourself at a disadvantage. Just cause you never PvP it does not mean that you are now not to be bothered by stuff that works in PvP as well. Is this Coop elitism, a cousin to PvP elitism ? 
I never played PvP in SoaSE:R either. And instead of trying to put things to speed X2, I would like to put income and research and production times x2 when the option is enabled.
I never played the DS mod, without your explanation what that means, it looks like you are complaining about fights lasting very short. Feelings are a subjective thing, For all intents and purposes, I will say that you decided to feel sad. Can I force to make you sad ? No. Sad feelings originate from you. The game does not seem to try to provoke depression in people. Music is quite lively, old TEC voices are no doom and gloom, so, I wonder where else it came from. If not factional portraits, I do not know where else from (from those I look elsewhere to not see it)
Missile spam is countered by point defenses, gardas, flak gear on the ship (those can be replaced) To intercept the missiles early, push the garda line, Ctrl-click the garda ship, move it in front of your main line, the ywill have enough space/time to shoot the missiles down. Heavy cruisers, cobalts, about a hundred gardas plus 5 cap ships, 2000 pop vs 2000pop engagement. They had plenty of fighters, bombers, LRM cruisers and Ogrovs, they shoot at cap ships and have huge 300 pen. And if you do want your caps to survive, put repair system on them, it heals 15 hp/s passively and 30/s for 30s each 2 minutes. Not autocastable so far. So, the big engagement, I lost 200 supply, they lost 2000.
Akkan as firepower goes is the worst offender, if it manages to not get stuck in other ships to fire. Cap ship is your minor hero that needs the gear and experience. Compared to 7800 exp required previously (+3buyable levels) I think 900 exp was Lv.4 (or 200-500-1200?) About 7K exp per cap ship. Now it takes 27000 exp. To make it shorter, buy experience upgrade. (+25% buff) At lv 4, buy another, (+50% exp gain, lv 7, +75% exp) Cobalt will then give 50-60-70 instead of 40 exp. At lv 10, you can stuff your Kol with a rapid autoloader, 3 heavy gauss slugs slugs, have 190 pen on the guns that at first do 154 dmg, at 100 pen with 14s reload. I generally do not pick the beam weapon. From the weapon that at first does 11 100 pen DPS, (x2) lv 10 gives 45% weapon damage and a good RoF increase, with amor, hp and so on, you can max out some 70-75 dps on one gun. That is aboutz 140-150 dps from passive weaponry.
However, even with the high lethality of systems, you get the counters working.
Dunov cap ship currently has bad target priorities with the shield, will auto target frig/cruisers, but a heavily damaged capship nearby, with 0 shield is ignored currently, This is a thing that when working properly will be able to make a capship tank a lot of damage.
Carrier capship has a skill with a missile with low HP but generally ogrov characteristics. And it has very good point defense, so if it cant shoot at ships, it will target missiles and fighters/bombers.
To understand counters, if target has more armor than enemy has penetration, there is gonna be damage reduction. Heavy cruisers at 75-99 armor will take 80 base damage from a bomber, because it has 80 damage. (look into files)
Kol lv 10 will have around 250 armor. LRM has 200 AP. That means, an excess of 50. Is it 33% dmg reduction ? Not sure.
Pick, Cobalt, 20-44 armor, weapon pen 25. Heavy cruiser, 75-99, AP 50. Cobalt will face 50-74 armor, heavy cruiser ? 0. In a sense, apart from cheapness, which is important, cobalt is outclassed. Vs a Bomber ? Cobalt and Heavy cruiser both take full damage. As cannon fodder goes, which, if you ignore, concentrate on a capship, well, overkilling if you are able, a capship will most likely drop your dps as well. Kol with damage reduction, finest hour, fusillade, getting some hochiko support, perhaps some dunov and missiles getting flakked, such a situation looks very inefficient.
Lv 1 capship is basically in most cases not worth the price. Late game production of lv 3? possibly. Huge blobs a problem to counter ? Marza reworked skill is still there and it is not weak by any means. Because that one oversaturates PD. But marza is quite squishy. So it requires support, those things do not fit to be in the front. Swarms of cobalts, if you can manage to survive their firepower, a marza will delete. Even its normal skill does some aoe. You have also the nuke radiation DoT consumable.
Akkan for all its uselessness as a combat ship, has AoE reload boost that is for all the ships in the radius. So, it is not the fighter ship, but a support one.Carrier has 9PD weapons and those do shoot at missiles
