Well, something needs to do a decent amount of damage against caps in the early-game.
In my opinion, Capital ships should be threatened by "fleets" in general. Not specific ship types, but just "a lot of shit with a lot of guns". And so a 30k credits worth of anything is a threat regardless of composition (early game; in late game, bombers and HCs would remain a solid threat). I would actually make LRFs LESS cost-efficient against caps than LFs.
That way LFs have a purpose early game (they would be relatively efficient vs caps) and you would need LRFs to protect them, but just a lot of LRFs would not be efficient against a cap... which forces the LRF spammer to do something else.
Right now, in my opinion, LRF efficiency against caps is the biggest screwup in early game unit balance.
You spam LRFs and counter EVERYTHING except flaks and fighters. You make flaks yourself, maybe invest in an anti-SC ability on a cap. Fixd. Now the only thing the opponent can do until heavy cruisers is spam the ridiculously inefficient flaks, not because they are good but because they just don't disappear that fast. How dumb is that.
If my suggestion passed, this is how it would look:
Your cap ship knocks on the opponent's door and he wants to kill it. The opponent makes LFs. You counter with LRFs. He counters with fighters. You counter with flaks. The opponent has to make more LFs - a loop, which means that the person who tweaks his composition better and/or has a better economy will win, as it should be.