I personally think we need a hard counter to heat seekers before anything else gets done with them. Anti missiles turrets have a hard time dealing with swarms so I think a second counter should be in play. They are heat seeking missiles so how about some kind of flare defense.
That would imo be a terrible design choice. A mechanic to counter only 1 weapon combination out of 16?
Talking about terrible designs: It does tell something about the state of a weapon, when friendly fire is the only weakness.
I really like heatseekers, but they are the only fire and forget weapon in the game.
They work well against many ships, they work well against turrets, they work well against drones and they do like all missiles take out whole chunks of hull at once. You don't even need to have the enemy in your fov when fighting him with heatseekers.
Therefore this:
Unless lockon missiles totally lose their lockon timer, or swarm missiles take a DPS cut equal to the value gained by removing the friendly targeting, I'm completely against this.
And i think friendly targeting should be removed. I consider it more as a bug than a serious attempt of balancing the weapon.
Yes when fighting heatseekers you can use the bad targetting to your advantage etc.,
but generally speaking: even if there is a way to play around a certain element or counter it, that doesn't mean its not broken.