@highland
in my personal opinon the obsession with "balance" - which a gameplay mechanic, is really fricken stupid, because the argument of gathering a bunch of gbs to gank a marduk can also be applied in any situation where you "simply" gather a bunch of UP ships to gank an OP ship, therefore negating the need to balance their stats.
As for bringing zoners to their original intent, that's simply fanboyism. Unfortunately for you, this game is not about Chris Roberts/Microsoft and their lore, but about the players. While it is used as a foundation, there is no need to obsess over the three lines of text and several lines of stats of vanilla like religious fanatics to the fricken bible. Chris Roberts created zoners, Zoner players expanded upon it to create so much more, and the result despite not being perfectly aligned with vanilla lore, works out for them.
You wanting a capship line for gateway is, also a flawed comparison as firstly gateway has Bretonia authorities who's literal job is to protect interest of bretonian corporations among other things, and if gateway really wanted a capship badly they could SRP a bretBS and it could probably be done with a bit of paperwork. Alas, gateway does not need a capship line since they can rely on the existing house infrastructure of tradelanes and nearby bases to guarantee safety, and besides gateway is a trading faction. Meanwhile zoners are a group of people, kind of like a race or a belief who have no definitive role, thus allowing them to be more than just traders. And, contrary to gateway zoners do not have an existing infrastructure of the houses to rely on, especially in deep space, thus they need to be fully autonomous including in their defensive capabilities.
You can try to compare disco with RL and how people don't need the kind of military might that zoners exhibit, but you'd probably be driving to work in a tank if the crime rate in your city was nearly half as high as Disco's crime rate, never less in the dangerous regions of the unexplored.
