[Suicide Junkie]

That's true...but, assuming some sort of success in the battle (with, say, 3 or 4 high-end phased shield generators), if your shields held off the shots, it needs no repair. On the other hand, it's not much fun repairing 12 or 16 armor components. Nor fast.

No matter what your defenses, 90% of the time you can expect maybe 1 or 2 cripples in your entire fleet. The rest will be undamaged, or vaporized.

Even if you just fired on and destroyed the cripples, or left them to limp home, your fleet would not be significantly diminished.
Adding a single repair ship will usually fix all battle damage by the next turn, too.