The Gunboat, in logical concepts, is the smallest and most agile ships of the capital class of vessels. Their purpose was a merger of a fighter and a cruiser, made to hunt down enemy bombers, as well as other small warships. This, in essence, makes them hated by both snubs, as it is larger and more powerful than them, and by the other capital vessels, as they can hit harder then a snubcraft while being agile enough to dodge their weapons from afar.
However, this conversation is going to revolve around the fact that, as a Gunboat pilot, you have to make a choice at being able to take down enemy snubcraft easier, an effective capital harasser, or a balance of both. Should you go down the path of being able to take down strikecraft(as that is what a gunboat was made to do), people will constantly scorn your choice of loadout of Solaris cannons, should you employ the fightercraft-killer gunboat to its role. Should you go down the path of cap harassment, you will get verbally attacked about severely damaging other capital vessels with those powerful Cerberus cannons and razors. Should you go down the middle road, you will be disavantaged in both snub warfare and cap warfare.
My question is why are gunboats hated for being deployed effectively? They are made to kill fightercraft and cruisers, yet somehow they are hated upon should they be armed to handle one group better than the other. If there is so much complaint about these variations of loadout, why do we keep them? Why not make the Gunboat ineffective at its job, in order to make everyone else happy? The same would go for other capital vessels. Why keep the snub-killer guns and cap-killer mortars if people are going to dislike the deployment of these weapons?
