To be fair, I've always wanted to explore in Mamba, just because it's cockpit is such a nice place to be. It always felt a little beneath it to go fighting in. Shame it's internals make it's long distance credentials a little too lacklustre, even with an open minded approach to the build. Still doable of course, but just not quite well enough for me to personally justify the build.
Is the Mandalay going to be perfectly optimal? Probably not, but that's part of the fun of the game for me; making things work, finding work arounds, and generally finding non-meta solutions that are less efficient, but more fun. Some ships just don't work for certain activities, but if there's one thing Elite does well, it's allowing players to try anything, and do things in spite of the limitations.