On one hand I agree with OP on how useless, literally everything other than Fixed Beam is on Fighters, especially with AI crew.
On the other hand, why should anyone care, since you can't engineer those fighters, they do tiny poop for damage, frankly, with any loadout, especially compared to your medium combat ship, that dishes out about 100 more DPS on average. So use whatever you like, it really doesn't make any difference at all.
So if one has a fighter hangar in his ship, that means this someone just thinks it's cool that some Fighter is flying alongside of them, and that's it. This hangar weights a lot and is utterly useless in any combat, even lowest PVE. Dunno where people getting idea that AI crew is accurate or good. It takes them eternity to kill even smallest ships, can't evade properly, can't shake aggro, and have extremely suboptimal flight routines. Like if target has 1-3% hull left, and fighter lost shield, it will start circling and regenerating shield instead of finishing off target, which usually means that enemy ship will regen it's own shield and they will take another eternity to duke it out 1v1... While I can rip them to pieces in same Taipan in under a minute, considering I can't either fly or shoot fixed properly. That, plus you have to babysit these NPCs so much if you not want them to just kill themselves left and right. That being said, I'm running with my Elite AI for a couple of years at least. Also to mention how many times my crewman almost got my invincible mothership (G5 Krait II) got almost killed by some regular pirate Pythons or freaking Asps... I really don't understand how is it even possible? No idea why some say AI crew is actually good or near accurate? Did you guys ever fought in SLF yourself to compare?
Sorry for the rant, I needed to vent, but all I said is still true.