[Alneyan]

Standard fighters are very poor actually: they may have a good bonus to offence, but they will not get Ship training (-20% to offence), their Combat Sensors are much harder to research and weaker (-35% to offence), and they will have a hard time breaking through all the defences on an enemy ship. In defence, fighters lack Stealth and Scattering Armour (-30% to defence), ship training (-20% to defence), and their ECM is weaker (-30% to defence), so even regular weapons are going to eat them for breakfast at point blank range. In this particular case, add -20% to both offence and defence.

Fighters can still do a good job, but you will need to lure the enemy into attacking a particular wormhole, and put all the fighters there. If you do not care much about losing the bulk of your fighters, a force of ten thousands or twenty thousands should do some real damage, combined with a nice fleet. I would not bother with low numbers of fighters: if you want to him them with fighters, hit them hard.

Devnull improves fighters somewhat if memory serves, mostly by giving bigger fighters, but those will lose part of their offence bonuses, if memory serves. There might be other things of interest in Devnull too; the weakened PDC will not be much of a deal though. If you can get big weapons and big shields for your fighters, plus fleet training and the best fighter CS/ECM, it could work. It is probably too late for all of that, however.