I don't have problem with carriers being very powerful, let them be - but in my opinion power should come with price tag, they should get quite a number of tweaks to be balanced a little bit better:
- they should definitely cost more in terms of production, I mean carrier modules should be among most expensive ones;
- they should cost more in terms of maintenance;
- drones should be equipped only with those weapon variants which do not require special resources;
- carrier logistics cost should be bigger than hull size itself - at least +1 for every carrier module;
- [optional, idk] maybe drones should not be treated exactly like regular Tiny ships you can manually build, but should fall in category of it's own, "drone", weaker than Tiny hull - less space for modules, less hp, only slightly better evasion chance, etc.?
It might be general problem with game's economic balance, I encountered a few things which elude me how they were really calculated on design stage in terms of value/costs ratio. I mean - when you have X choices in game, when only one is optimal and all the others are clearly worse, it makes whole beautiful diversity only an illusion. Right now I see like 0 reasons why anything but carriers (+ maybe, some single other, dedicated support ship per fleet) should ever be built once you finally can build them. There is no meaningful choice or trade-off here, only reason I build anything else is for fun.