Those are all reasonable sounding words to retroactively explain away the existence of a ship without shields that had to fight a ship with shields just to allow the protagonists who had the shields to destroy tie fighters left and right.
It's not like the original team sat around and said, "Okay, the empire has the best tech and strongest weapons except in the case of their small fighters because they forgot how important fighters were as a result of being so dominant for about 5 years. So we'll have the bulk of their fighters get destroyed in two hits while everyone else gets destroyed in 20 hits.". No, the original team said, "Okay we have a big battle, the good guys need to blow up a bunch of fighters, but they have shields so we can show them be in increasing danger until the final scene."
It's a fun mechanic and makes for good storytelling, just people give too much credit and buy bullshit too easily, take it for what it is, a silly part of the fiction and enjoy it.
Also the missile boats were fucking dumb. "we can only put 2 missiles on our best fighters. Let's put 100 missiles on this fighter and then give me the ability to go like twice as fast as anyone else also the emperor says not to use it anymore after the player finishes the game because even the emperor thinks this ship is too OP"
