What has changed in competitive play that has every team looking for an advantage in terms of ship builds?
Back then teams were happy flying the exact same thing over and over again. Back then teams also focused more on killing than disabling. Even back then countering ships did happen, but most teams were happy enough to roll with their current setup still, because they were happy flying the same thing over and over again. Back then a lot of teams put more effort into practising their pilot coordination, gunning and engineering.
A lot of teams today are not like back then: Not happy flying the exact same thing over and over again and are not as practised. If I am correct than it may also explain the increase of Hwachas, comp and casual, because you don't need to practise that much to hit with it and it allows your teammate an easier kill, while you yourself die slower or not at all.
Believe it or not, even I don't want to fly the same Mobula loadout every single time and even I want to fly ships that are not a Mobula, but I also don't want to ruin my own fun by handicapping myself and my team.
Since there is no way to get a great lobby system with current ingame "tools", I have best solution. We declare mobula as only competitive ship, so everyone can only fly mobula. \o/
But I do approve of this.