I am writing an incredibly long effortpost on capital ship and bomber balance and gameplay that I will be posting eventually. It was going to be an explanation of the SNAC nerf and such in response to this thread but it is now a lot more than that and has a whole exploration of the numerical implications of things like armour upgrades and nanobots.
But the summary of the SNAC portion of it is "the nerf exists because the SNAC exists to fill a role that was needed back before we understood how to make large ships in Freelancer work passably".