[Balance] Standard Combat Upgrades ineffective?

The upgrades to standard combat abilities seem to have very slight effect despite their high-flown names... Though I still tend to acquire the protective upgrades, the weapon upgrades at 5% a time seem especially unimpressive.  The upgrades could be doubled first off to 10% increments, and then further increased, unless players have started to research them? 

I'm happy for a fully researched ship to be at least twice as effective as an unreseached one, in terms of both hull and armour- though since there are two forms of protective research, weapons research should still have greater increments, and then be three times as effective?

I'm also in favour of experience for the smaller ships, which could be a more modest increase.  It was noted in another thread that this would make it harder for the loser of a battle to recover.  If you based the experience gain on in-combat hull regeneration rather than ships destroyed, then perhaps it wouldn't be as unfair?

One alternative would be to make new tiers of standard combat research available in the next expansion- perhaps a benefit to trans-race alliances could be new alloys and hybrid weapons...?