To go on the outshining of weapon A vs Weapon B
Flak and Light Mortar
Light Mortar surpasses Flak in dps and range (get lesmok and that thing and boy can you shoot far, and hit often now that it has no spread.) Get a good gunner on the light mortar, and you can easily destroy a gat-flak anything, if you are using Merc - Mortar that is....(you know what, I may just try that loadout...sounds complicatedly fun.)
Heavy Mortar is the same, higher DPS, but it lacks in killing power than the light mortar does.
I was recently in a game with some level 3 pilot who bitched about Spud Nick's Flak-Lumber Galleon, and the pilot was on our team. For about...five matches, we won, some were stomps, other were rather close (mostly because he got pissed and decided to go into the fray and effectively made the galleon useless doing so and wound up dead himself.) Because "this strategy is too different.
The other team, bless them for sticking around after getting womped on so much, learned a way to fight that Galleon: snipe out the lumberjack and charge. They even didn't fix the balloon much, giving them both gunners while they camped the hull. Though the idea of the wingship is to take them out when they do that...that pilot...could have had four easy kills...but he was one of those ramming pilots...so...we got them all when he should have.
Anyways, he was bitching about the stand still as they come tactic being boring--which can be true--but it got to the point that the people on the other team were vouching for my ship. All of them were new, but they were practically praising our aim, "this guy is hitting us with all his rounds" they said. Again, his ship had many opportunities to take out other ships, he just never did it.
The only person who complained about the extreme power of a lumberjack hull kill, and then heavy flak death blow, was a guy on the winning side...who then promptly left when a ship on the other team left and my ship then filled that.
I know this was a huge roundabout of most likely tl;dr, but the point is that Smollet's observation seems to be the most common complaint of the jack. It changes your comfort zone drastically...and people don't like that. If it was truely OP, everyone would be flying a lumberfish....
tl;dr -- I. Hate. SAUERKRAUT.