Launch time does make a massive difference. Large early game carriers would likely take an hour or more to empty their hangars, time during which they are massively vulnerable to ambushes and the like. With how fast missies are relatively, the time from the detection of a missile combatant to the time of missile impact is measured in minutes, this is not enough time to launch the entire fighter screen. It creates meaningful decisions : Do you launch your AMM fighters only and let the missile ship get away? Do you launch a mix of ASM and AMM fighters? Is launching an extra sensor fighter worth sacrificing an extra missile fighter? Do you keep a portion of your fighter wing constantly on patrol to ensure fast response times? Is that worth the cost in maintenance? Do you risk keeping your entire wing in the hangar to ensure optimal performance for an ambush?
I'm for meaningful decisions, which is why I was asking if there were any here. And you've done an admirable job pointing out a case where they might be.
This still doesn't seem to hold up much, though. Under a system where missile flight times and wing deploy times are on similar scales, you probably end up with people running a CAP doctrine (in addition to providing other defensive umbrellas). That sounds cool, but we're back to Aurora's limitations in automatic order handling and templating making deploying a carrier force a massive exercise in tedium.
... current overwhelming superiority of parasites ...
Suffice to say we seriously disagree, here, especially with the slew of changes coming in C# that massively favour larger ships.