Cloaks aren't meant to be the end-all-be-all of escaping fights. They're not supposed to be a guaranteed escape every time. With a 3 second charge time on fighters, it was.
And as the admins have been saying since cloaks were added, they're not meant to be used for escaping fights.
But I'm glad to see that gunboats have a useful cloak now, will be putting this to use