Them being used for long range shooting is fine, but Aurora has a hard cap on range via FCS. So both HPMs and Mesons exist on the same curve as other weapons, but there is no reason to build an 80cm Meson or HPM, unlike say lasers or plasma carronades, where the lack of range is made up for by the increase in damage.
Likewise, they fire slower as they get bigger. Which can be offset by capacitor tech to a point, but at some point, anything beyond FCS range is pointless for HPM/Mesons and anything under incremental RoF is almost pointless since Mesons only do 1 damage and HPMs’ shield damage is irrelevant unless used en mass.
One or two big HPMs is good for ranged blinding, but that’s an awful lot of RP for one specific usecase, ya feel me?