You could have the AI check for "threatening" weapons before throwing down the ignore order; so a monitor with pure pd would get ignored as long as you have larger ships. Nothing wrong with forcing players to arm their monitors with real weapons.

"First thing I'm going to do is put it on enemy spawn..."

I was just having issues with that today, nice timing.

Absolutely. This was a while ago, and some new options have been added to the game since then. I just tried giving it a built-in missile autoloader and changed the system to the new reserve deployment. It already feels a lot better and different enough from the anubis that it may be worth finishing.

In the end I abandoned the idea. Partly because the flux savings from a paladin were less than I hoped (so the buff it's getting is very welcome), but it was also because 4 slots and 2 fighters didn't feel like enough options. I added a couple small missiles to solve this but it didn't feel right.

I had a surprisingly similar design in mind... there's the old file!

I figured 2 medium universal slots and a large energy hardpoint and 2 fighter bays with limited flux stats might make the paladin more appealing for the turret slot... or you could run support fighters for pd and go full assault.