Roleplay ?

[Thexare]

or is set up in a bomber or VHF loaded up with OORP weaponry that gets justified by the rest of the server's players because "they're considered generic items".

Are you familiar with the term "Acceptable Breaks From Reality"? Here, TVTropes has some reading you can do.

Freelancer, even without the Discovery mod, has quite a few of them for the sake of gameplay.

If you're going to complain about Supernovas being considered generic, complain also about the lack of vertically-oriented systems, the fact that when you kill your engines, you gradually slow down (hint: not a whole lot of friction in space!), the fact that ships catch fire in a zero-oxygen environment... there's a whole host of things to complain about, things that were implimented in various reasons for the sake of gameplay.