In fairness the gunship is pretty poorly designed. It's only used as a yardstick because it's the strongest "vanilla" thing. Even that's debatable imo since a fleet carrier or siloship in the right hands could erase it.
Siloship or a fleet carrier don't make good yardsticks, though, because they are designed for missile/drone spam and are going to be easier once you finally get to coming there and punching them in the dick (granted, fleet carrier is almost a gunship in its own right, but still not as strong).
Vanilla ships in general are relatively under-equipped and not very manoeuvrable - in addition to some retarded module placement often resulting in "shoot here for Michael Bay", thankfully gunship is only mildly affected, the lulziest, by far, is hiveship, though siloship is also prone to fatal hilarity, sometimes even self-inflicted - I have seen it blowing itself up more than once around Vesta, like it was a piece of Ork engineering.
It's quite staggering when you compare Main Belt Extraction mission with default vanilla fleet, where it ends up in prolonged engagement that may even end up with badly scarred gunship chasing your badly scarred ships around the moonlet, and with a well designed player ship built for direct engagement when it's generally decided by a massive alpha strike tearing gunship to pieces (ripping off the entire rear 1/3 with reactors and engines does count as "disabling" for me) or at least sandblasting guns, radiators and engines off it along with most of its hull thickness, while simultaneously trying not to get hit (at least not too much). Even more staggering is when you pit two such designs against each other - and I'm speaking of almost vanilla stuff, with vanilla power generation, not multi-GW stuff that lits up nearby celestial bodies with its radiators (seriously) and annihilates anything venturing within Mm from it with streams of pure lag.
And I'm not even doing proper autistic optimization metagame - if only because I object to my spaceships being massive armoured space dildos, a bunch of launchers wrapped around fuel tank and an MPD with some wire (with optional soda can on top) or massively beradiatored flashlights held together by hope and barely strong enough to sustain tidal forces when orbiting an asteroid.
No, I want my ships to look like "Imma fuck you up" and act on their promise up close and personal, to be versatile and to carry most of their armour in their fuel tanks, with the remainder relying more on good arrangement than pure thickness.
When engineering I am mostly tweaking my ships in terms of arrangement of individual parts or making complex gun payloads, sometimes tweak some gun or engine to better suit my needs or to get rid of infuriating flaws it has.
Given those considerations, my ships are doing quite well.
Did anybody ever run any CoaDE design tournaments?
You can find a few videos on YT.
I am not an MP guy, but given that this game is effectively massive engineering dick measuring contest, it would really benefit from actual MP.
AI is inherently dumb and can't be expected to make a good use of anything more sophisticated than "stick all the shooty bits on the part you wish turned towards enemy and hope for the best".
