Sentries on a drone boat may change your mind. Off hand I think it was around 2-2.5k alpha every 4seconds. 3 of the damage types (kinetic, em, explosive) can easily do long range 100+km sniping. So from experience it will 1-2 shot frigs. Cruisers and battle cruisers tend to melt too.
The applied DPS of a drone boat is quite good as it’s quite trivial to always work in optimal. With 3x drone tracking computers and swapping between range and tracking scripts and drones you can have Garde’s consistently hit BS sized ships 3km away from you or swap to range scripts and the other sentries and snipe away.
It’s why I was disappointed with the artillery weapons, it was just lacking compared to my Eos on so many levels.