I don't really see how role play factor come into play in this discussion.
If your setting of your empire values the life of pilots of the fighters, that is totally fine. In that situation, you avoid using fighters unless cornered, that's fine. If you choose totally avoid using fighters, that is also fine. But, this is not the reason of removing the fighters if you don't like it from your role play settings.
Same goes for meson. Again, it is not 'uncounterable' as many of the players think it to be. Successful meson designs (aka meson fighters), are highly specialized and require specialized designs to counter them (aka anti-fighter ships). A general use tool is not as efficient as a specialized tool when dealing with specialized situations, and this definitely apply to Aurora. I understand that under role play limitations, designing the optimal ships for every role may not be possible. As a result, if such a fleet fails to defeat a meson fighter swarm, it is not because meson swarm is overpowered. More often than not, such fleets are not suitable to deal with a swarm of fighters. A meson swarm will wreck them, a missile fighter swarm will also achieve the same thing, and a swarm of microwave fighters will also mission kill such a fleet. Thus, the failure of such role play limited fleets cannot be used to argue whether a design is overpwered or not.
It seems to me that there is some degree of misunderstanding about arena/tournament play. The idea of arena duels comes from the fact that in VB6 NPR/spoilers design ships so inadequately. Thus, ships we used in the campaign, or the ones derived from them, are tested against each other under a controlled settings. Typically the two fleets have equal tech and similar BP (including ammunition BP), and are given large enough starting separation to allow tactic maneuvers. In this way, we can get a better idea about what counters what, and what cannot be countered by what. From a role play point of view, all these can be viewed as simulation, concept-proofing and prototyping before a design of a ship goes through before production. I definitely see my imperial naval design bureau are full of optimization freaks to adjust the designs to their best potential.