I am playing as a miner so most of my skills were oriented that way so not sure how much combat skills would help. Ship customization also plays a part as how quick can you turn etc.
When you get to higher level sectors definitely feels more arcade like to me. I have a hard time hitting the enemies who often will have 2 or 3 ships on you. Appartenly you can have crew members shoot turrets which might help but I am not sure how to set that up (might not work on smaller ships). I added crew but can’t determine how to place one on a weapon. Maybe some weapons need to be a certain type or in a certain hard point.
I use two weapon out of 5 for mining lasers which can attack enemies to a degree but they eat up energy. Drones are the biggest problem. I bought Point Defense but they do not work automatically that I can tell and they are hard to hit.