Well, i started leveling for real my sniper yesterday (my T3 snipers) and i must say, i need to lear a little about positioning, and compensate for the fact that i have 300ms handicap to deal with. But it is awesome, not a boring ship, it is great. The problem is that the nawb comunity think they have to put those increase dammage/speeed modules, and they are forced to use the special module.
Try to use it as a heavy gunship, you will se the havoc you will cause, the power of making an ceptor that is comming for you to run away before reaching half the distance with a huge positron crit to the face. I admit it is boring as hell playing against a team with 2 torpedoes and 2 snipers, cause you are always under fire when flying a LRF, but that is life.
When i was playing with Templar AE to max it out, i did about 15 kills in one match using it as a heavy gunship. It was so fun to eat the entire shield of a great guard with 2 shots, also making emp snipers run away when they try to gunship it. Engies (fed ones) run towards you, and then suddenly change course with 1/3 of the hull left . kkkkkkkkkk. But of couse, the jerry one could use a very big increase in surv since they die with 1 xxxx.
And btw, what they said about dodging the sniper shots even on xxxx frig, it is very possible to do, i think when i play a frig only 20% of the shots land on me, and usually it happens when there are more than 1 sniper, or, the sniper has like 40ms ping when im having 400ms.