Good phrase.

I happen to be working (with another occasional Zoner) on what promises to be a novel in the category of "space opera", which will include more than one battle. As far as I know, they all will take place within the volume of various planetary systems, which reduces the search space... but increases, by some unknown order of magnitude, the number of objects available to hide behind or among.

On the matter of architecture: When a war begins, ships will already exist in each combatant's forces, designed to pre-set parameters. The maneuverability of each class of ship will have been an economic trade-off among the variables of mass (read: inertia), motive force, and mission. The larger the ship, the more inertia = the less maneuverable on short notice, despite the size of its main engines. Engine power is too simplistic a way to rate the usefulness of large ships vs small, i.e. "fighters".

Perhaps a 20th Century surface navy 'carrier battle group' is a tenuous analogy in a space battle -- perhaps not. A fighter is, in essence, a weapon with an engine attached. It extends both the defensive and offensive range of the ship (or convoy) to which it is assigned. The question then reduces to "drone, or manned?", and the answer depends on two things: reaction time, and motivation.

For the sake of argument, I will concede reaction time to an AI (the novel in question includes AIs to run the larger ships). I will not concede motivation to any pilot other than a live, sentient one -- not when he or she is fighting for the homeworld in the orbital space above it -- and especially not when the pilot's homeworld has already been destroyed in another battle while he or she was on duty elsewhere.

Call it "Pearl Harbor Syndrome" if you wish -- it works.