I don't think there's some ultimate goal from CIG to make light fighters the bestest most opest omega goodest fighters in the game. No, the light fighter meta has a far simpler explanation. You decided to make a ship whos schtick is flying better in a game about out flying your opponent. Dakka? Armor? Ordinance? None of that matters if you can't get guns on target. And that isn't going to change with physicalized damage. You are never going to balance fighter classes so long as you've ranked them by flight performance. You also can't just make them all fly the same for obvious reasons either. There needs to be more nuance to different ships flight characteristics than "gladius flies better than everything". Even something as simple giving heavy fighters more boost capacity in exchange for less overall speed while giving light fighters the least boost capacity but highest possible accelerations would go along way in balancing handling variation.