There's no real way to avoid it, the Corvette is a better combat ship than the Conda or Cutter. As someone in the other thread said: "The only downside is the jump range." Which is pretty much true. Remove that downside and what do you end up with?
Better how? I've yet to see an argument that isn't just over inflating the importance of some marginal benefit like agility or hardpoint placement or SCB stacking (which you can do on any of the big 4 with similar results). Really it's just one of 2 big ships that can take being rammed or focused due to sufficiently large base shields. The other being the Cutter, over which it has a marginal but functionally not-significant agility advantage, and a very significant and meta-centric speed and base shield disadvantage.
In my opinion owning a Corvette (or several other Fed ships) REQUIRES grinding for the Guardian Frame Shift Drive Booster.
Once you have a few engineers unlocked and that booster in hand, you can make almost any ship (within reason) into what you want.
This is essentially true, but since the Corvette isn't best in class in any regard, it can only ever have middling values on any stat so if you are going for middle of the road ship, then the Vette is one that doesn't have any glaring weaknesses except wasting your time getting to the fight and being unable to keep pace with and hence be a threat to medium ships.