I think Neural Combat Net is evil when used to good advantage. It allows you to just have one highly skilled ship lending its skill to a whole fleet of ships that don't even need to be trained, which in serious combat with a peer human opponent is a big deal. Personally I like that it's a special tech, because it seems to me you'd need special insight and/or massive research to get something like that to work. I don't quite believe in it. It could make sense to mod in a similar component for the psychics, though. I just made a tweaked expansion of this for Proportions 2.2. If you thought it was useless before, you'll really hate it in this Version.
I also don't disdain the massive weapons so much. The one-shot thing is their main weakness, and in general does make them less effective than the highest tech Version of the standard Versions. If you're playing a game like Proportions or High research cost or limited colonizable planets or some other way where research rates let you burn straight through the tech tree, then these can become very useful weapons, it seems to me, particularly if you get them before you get the choice to invest in research into the regular specific weapon tech of the same type. I agree though that they tend to be good on specialized support ships used in a fleet, and more valuable if you're using tactical combat so you can fire at the best target with a good chance to hit.
If you're playing a game where the research tree gets exhausted really quickly, then ya these are a lot less useful, but the cause is the research rate in the game type you're playing, more than the inherent weakness of the weapons.
I also disagree on the massive shield bases - I think those
are pretty bad - the weakest of all of them, I would say. They seem massively overpriced and waste a whole facility slot for 5000 points of protection. Try just building a Cargo Storage facility and filling it with small weap platforms with armor on them, and you will have a much stronger "shield" that will be built at much less expense, if I recall correctly from looking at the numbers a month or so ago. The only disadvantage is that the armor platforms will get destroyed bit by bit instead of regenerating in between battles. Though, it lack the other problem with the Massive Shield Base - that it's not phased, so PPB's will bypass it.
Massive shield bases (better ones) are the ancient tech I'd rather were standard. They used to be, in SE3. It seems more reasonable than the current gamey technique of building little protection platforms to soak up damage.
PvK