But you describe Battles of small scale. Which, I agree, allows the Conni to Play at its stregth. But she isn't a frigatte but will be our heavy unit in the field. More offen being forced to be at the Center of the fight. Going for an all Alpha build makes only Sense if the ship can decied when and where to make a stand.
The Conni is simply to large to have that luxus. She will be bound in places to defend, she will fight multiple enemies at the same time which can manouver around her. It comes with her role in any doctrine.
I acknowledged fleet battles are a different matter, yes.
How ever a lot of operations are far more common with small groups of ships, or even a singular. There just aren't enough ships to send fleets everywhere for either side.
Which means a lot of fights will be ones where they can play to their strengths and attrite the enemy away. You can do a lot of damage that way.
As for fleet battles, there are limits there as you can't completely abandon your less capable Spacecraft that are fighting alone side you. How ever it's not like any Klingon can dodge it with its agility, so it should be able to fight in high agility rolls with in fleet battles as well, like skirmishers. Which means there isn't really a reason it needs to take the center of battle or even form up a standard center, because it is such a fast but also rather powerful attacker it can continually threaten the flanks of any hostile line of battle. Basically eating away at the sides, of course lines would use things like their own skirmishers to try and prevent that. But I'm pretty doubtful any ships the Klingon might use for that can properly hold up against this new Heavy Cruiser. Which means you can in many cases probably prevent normal fleet battle engagements as less standard formations need to be taken to keep these heavy skirmishers from ripping the formation apart.
Well all this is a way of saying that in the end one designs ones strategies around the ships one has available today. If one has plenty of heavy brawlers, then play to their strength and try to engage in large brawling fights. When one has a lot of agile ships which the current Federation is more biased towards, make it hard to hold coherent formations and make it easier to pick away at weaknesses in the other side. Make it hard to advance, strangle their supplies, try and take down anyway that strays to far and in the end isolate the fleet all alone behind enemy lines with few supplies. That would be a good outcome in this stratagem.
Now if we had time to design and build sufficient Brawlers after this design, I'd not be averse to it. But we'll probably struggle to make it on time. To an extent one has to fight with the forces one has and the strategies those allow, it's better to not force a role on to a ship it's not best suited for. To put another way, what is the point to give brawler abilities to a ship that for the most part probably will not use them, not even in a fair few fleet actions.
Getting more guns and so might be something for them to get later in a refit when they've become slower compared to other ships.
