Everyone lobbies for their favorite factional interests. If you have influence and numbers on your side, you get your way.
Many believe that they understand your factional ethos better than you do, i.e. Zoners are effectively peacenik space hippies smelling of patchouli oil, singing kumbaya.
Personally, I think the Nephilim should be morphed into a less martial version - convert all of the hardpoints into class 10s with better firing arcs. The Persephone would be the Zoner dreadnought until a better model is drafted. And they do need heavy warships in order to independently survive in the Omicrons on their own terms. Yes, "throwing" a Colony Ship at Nomads is unrealistic, but that bad boy has a heavy powercore.
As far as the lack of Order and Core dreadnoughts goes, I personally would like to see them in game. The fact they don't exists is odd. Would it be feasible to allow them to use House dreadnoughts without having to scribble out some (often obviously transparent) story before getting access to it ?
i will say again that most of zoner capital ships are used only to farm nomad remains, but ... nomads are enemies of the zoners, it is even on the zoner descrition on the in game faction description, so like the core players send their capital ships against the order, for exemple, it is also normal in terms of rp, zoner players to send their ships against the noamds, now what ships are, well that is another thing, if the problem is that most use colony ships, that means that is ok to send the aquilon carrier?! for me is all the same, since the beggining the use of the colony ships is all wrong!
Outworlders being a thing actually potentially remedies some of the issues and concerns with Zoner PvE raised here, so I might experiment a bit and see what that's like. No promises tho.
Zoner PVE in Kappa would be interesting. Currently, Corinth offers high-level missions vs. Nomads, but I think the missions are offered by Corsairs. Why are Corsairs the sole mission-givers on a Zoner (Outworlder) station, when they have their own bases in the same system?