Trying to balance scarcity mechanisms required for a credible setting, with the desire to repeatedly throw ships at each other until they are destroyed, is an exercise in futility.
Organized PvP is a sport that (as soon as they tossed the idea of no FTL comms) should always have been done in a telepresent simulator mode, at no cost to, and with no impact on, the rest of the game. Instead, we got CQC...which had potential in and of itself, but which solved no problems.
Anyway, that's largely a separate issue from ship balance. The fact that the FDL is over represented isn't some 'meta effect' that confuses cause and effect. It's an entirely rational response to the fact that the ship broadly outperforms most others in the most versatile class of combat vessel. I spent years trying to avoid and/or improve upon the meta, but from the day my CMDR could afford one I nearly always found myself back in the FDL whenever my performance actually mattered, because it was the best. Then they made it even better, effectively removing what choice I had, even as they degraded the character, and my enjoyment of, the ship.
Only the fluke of about a thousand unfortunate Engineering rolls gave me a reprieve from the FDL, because the best FDL I could make wasn't competitive with drives that made it one of the slowest PvP FDLs around. Unfortunately, that era wasn't particularly enjoyable either, as it mostly reinforced how potent the FDL, and how crappy the Engineering content gating, was. The situation improved a bit with 3.0, but we're still left with many ostensible choices that amount to very few viable combat options, unless all you want to do is prey on robots or novice CMDRs.
