I haven't read the entire 43 pages (currently) of this thread and I don't know all the ships or their loadouts by heart. And while I think it's awesome that BW devs are taking an interest in GSF, I find it odd that the striker is the first thing they're looking at. The phrase that comes to mind is "rearranging furniture on a ship that's going down". I believe we should forget about strikers for now. Yes, they need a speed boost or a faster lock-on time, or something like that to be as competitive as the other ships, but that is not going to bring more players to GSF.
Asking the small GSF community what changes they would make to the jack-of-all-trades Strike Fighter isn't really helping the community. It only helps those of us hardcore GSF'ers willing to stick it out with the lop-sided dice rolls.
What GSF needs is:
A Better Tutorial
The tutorial needs to provide the choice to fly different ships to learn how they work and the option to fly against other players with less than 'x' number of games. Let noobs fight noobs in stripped down ships to learn the game. Some kind of match-making / boosting system
There should be some sort of leveling system for better match-making (either visible or behind the scenes), or even some sort of mild boosting system to get pilots close to the same level. WZ's do this and most players already know how to play their toon at least a little bit. GSF is a whole new ball game. GSF for a beginner is like a level 1 with no gear going into a WZ against a level 60 with full PVP gear. If a new person is trying to GSF at that "level 1" stage and they join a random group that winds up facing a pre-made group who are all at the "level 60" stage - it blows a lot of new players out of the game. I quit for a long time, at first, because of this. It just seemed that only the players that played GSF all day could do this. Legacy Wide
GSF is a totally different animal. I think making ships available across a player's legacy should be something to at least investigate. When I play my alts, I don't play GSF, and I know other people do the same. If the GSF hangar was legacy wide, we would totally play GSF on our alts. If the average is 6 alts per player, that is a LOT of game hours across a server that are being missed and I think it cuts Bioware's GSF revenue stream off at the knees. Inter-server Queues
I've heard this was impossible. Well, maybe not impossible, but so impractical that it will never be on the table. I still think it should be considered. Faster queues, more buzz, more interest = more Cartel Coins being spent.
The bottom line - more people are not going to join a fleet because one ship is sort of fixed - people will join the fleet when the fleet is fixed. If Bioware could double the participation in GSF, wouldn't that mean increased profits for the company? I'm pretty sure it would at least be more fun for the players.