If you can knock out several players using those fighter hordes in the early to mid game long before they can get effective defense against them, they are too powerful.
What is so effective at taking out fighters in the later stages of the game? Certainly not those anti-fighter PDCs. You need quite a few of them to start destroying fighters in reasonable numbers. The only PD that can hit fighters with more than a 1% success rate are the Point Defense Beams, and those max out at 17 damage, so they take several shots to kill one fighter. Unless, of course, they stick 2-3 small shield generator Vs on their fighters, which means they will take 5-7 hits from PDBs before dying.