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One could argue that since they are beam weapons that the damage over time is realistic.If you think about it a beam capable of cutting thru armor would have to generate enormous amounts of heat and therefor continue to melt the metal a bit after the beam hit doing continuous damage for a time.
and one could argue that nothing about this game is truly realistic and therefore should play by the devs rules
A bug is behavior that runs contrary to what the programmer intends. The illuminator was meant to have lower damage than it actually exhibits, hence it's a damage bug. Whether that's a good or bad thing (I think we can all agree it's a bad thing) or realistic has no bearing on whether or not it's a bug.
i love ppl like this, its so hard to imagine a game that doesnt have at least one person who wnats to make it realistic. im one of these ppl, and i personally hate how ships tend to slam into each other. ok, now get back to topic 
everyone wants the game to be realistic, but logically it has its limits. if people cant accept that then thats their problem.
Even pretending this is a realism thing, how is it realistic that a beam does extra damage before the shields are down? The beam gets deflected/negated/whatever the hell it is shields do, end of story. Yet it still deals the 'mystery damage' no matter what.
Random maps sometimes not providing a one-jump asteroid to every player is a long standing bug, but they've never fixed that either. Just because something doesn't get an immediate hotfix doesn't mean it's not a bug.
While we didn't touch LRM's directly, there is tons in there that changes relationships with them. We've tested the crap out of them and the status quo has changed.Consider this example. Heavies were originally intended to be prototypical counter to LRM's. However, test after test said otherwise, despite our math. In one test sample that we ran over and over again, 102 Kodiaks vs 170 Illums (equal food comparison) the Illums actually beat the Kodiaks. When we updated the targetting and Kodiak ranges the Kodiaks defeated them handidly and were consistantly within error of the value we expected in our master balance spreadsheet. Obviously this isn't the only change as this is just one relationship but you get the idea - we dealt with them indirectly because we don't believe the fundamental problems are with LRMs (or Illums) themselves.
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It seems to me as if their damage output has been taken into account with the game's overall balancing. If that's the case, and I have no reason to believe it's not, then they're now functioning as intended.
Its a bug cause the devs says so even after the hot fix of 1.041
As Blair stated
We've confirmed there is a bug. Thanks for the attention to detail. It will be fixed next update.
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