Actually advent starfish is great against phasic traps if you can pull it of and guy doesn't subvert you.
The problem is that
ANY combat frigate can do this if the enemy fleet isn't guarding the location. The adjudicator is quite fragile and easy to kill and of no help in a real fleet battle, so I honestly think you're much better off putting your money into general-purpose ships and using that to "brute-force" your way through the defenses.
At the end of the day, it's the enemy
fleet that's going to be the real challenge; unsupported static defenses is always going to be child's play to take down with a sufficiently large force. I do not have any faith in the adjudicator's ability to withstand a reasonable amount of fleet-based resistance, which is why I disregard it as a viable unit in general.
For TEC, the Ogrov offers you single-target damage at exceptional range at a reasonable cost. This makes it far more viable. The Adjudicator's damage is spread out so it will be absorbed better by repair, and their cost is much higher so if there are defenders there it is more than likely the adjudicator will die first.
It sounds cool to me, however this weapon is probably the most expensive to research, and the only one being on a civilian tree, so having it will take you a big amount of logistic slots since you also generally want a fair amount of military research...
This is essentially the problem; you have to shove out a ludicrous amount of prerequisites to access this superweapon. It doesn't help that the Advent civic tech tree is woefully barren beyond the third-lab level. The culture techs are good, and allure of the unity is good, maybe a couple of pacts, but
that's it.
The DE is actually very good in the Advent mirror match, where it can deprive your enemy of their mitigation bonus while giving you your own. This is a
brutal swing because Advent mitigation at this point in the game can hoover at 90%+ when maxed out. Mitigation is one of the few game mechanics that features
accumulating returns, so the higher mitigation is the more powerful a 1% swing is.
Against TEC... you
REALLY should have the game in the bag by this point by sheer frigate power. TEC shouldn't be seriously challenging you once you have both a battleball
AND a concentration-buffed carrier swarm. Although with the new and improved novalith they should have some more late game staying power.
And against Vasari... the big problem remains phase missiles, so it actually makes little sense to invest in your mitigation in this matchup, weakening the DE.
One of the biggest things Advent could get is some love to their 4-7 level civic technologies. It wouldn't be enough to cure the deliverance engine, but it would soften the otherwise "dead labs" you have to plot down to access it. A good target would be resource focus, which currently requires investment in the mid-5-figures range just to become profitable. Most of the time, investing that much $$$ in fleet will win the game outright, and just to get a minor improvement over what basic unupgraded trade port operation offers? Yeah...
