So been thinking about certain design choices in space shooters. The gold standard for the genre is considered the Descent Freespace series. They're largely known for being the first space game to really give a sense of scale to Capital Ship. You had ships that seemed 6 kilometers long and nearly as wide, practically moving levels ala Shadow of Colossus. Except you never usually get to take these colossi. Not directly. They often function as giant set pieces, slugging it out with your own fleets capital ships. You may be tasked with wiping out fighters who harass them, or your bombers, or you might strip weapons off the enemy cap ships, but its always someone elses big guns who finish them off.
I kind of like that design choice, because it makes capital ships seem like unstoppable monsters. It SHOULD require another titan to beat a titan.
And then there's the other design choice, where your jack-of-all-trades fighter can pop capital ships dozens, or tens of dozens at a time. In these cases, you either have a healthy number of specialized missiles, or these capital ships have "Weak points" you can attack to down them yourself.
It makes for nice arcady gameplay, but after awhile you start to wonder why even have these big floating targets if all it takes is 2-4-8 (More or less depending on technology tree) well places anti ship missiles.
In fairness, there's usually talk of "prototypes" or alien transforming mech suit ships, but still.
One game series did both of these things. Strike Suit Zero was the name. The classic version of the game, you could strip down enemy capital ships, but always had to wait for your side to finish them off. Then some DLC's came along that incorporates a concept of "weak points", and you could sink a battleship with well places laser fire on about four-eight of these little white dots that popped up on your radar. Took some time to do, and the enemy ships had brutal defenses you needed to strip out, but it still meant anti ship specialists became redundant.
They decided to put this new mechanic into the main campaign of the remastered "Director's Cut" version of the game, which made no sense to me because the story was built around escorting bigger ships, a failure to do so ending the mission. Meaning it was designed around protecting ship killing specialists.
Who even bother, if you can just sink them yourself.