Remember initiative take an important role in combat turn order
I learned the hard way making fighters with the smallest gauss. I tought, why noot, if I'm faster the smallest range will be enough to hit everything except in actual combat they moved first so I was out of range, then I moved in range but the shooting phase was lost at that point.
This was maybe on 5x don't know if it changed.
They made one hell of point defence ahainst missiles tho.
The way initiative works, it's actually advantageous to move after your opponent in the movement cycle, as it means your ships can make better interception attempts, and likewise trumps interception attempts on themselves. For instance, if you order your fighter to move to a vessel, it will move straight to the vessel's current position if it moves first, then the enemy vessel in question will carry out the rest of it's own movement, possibly moving out of the range of the fighters. Likewise, if your fighter moves last, then they can move to the final position of the vessel in question, rather than on an estimated bearing. Anything moving 2,000 km/s or faster will very much be hard to intercept with minimum-range systems unless you flat out beat them in initiative.
This is why the higher, more valuable initiative ratings on your officers is a good thing, because it denotes how late in the move-cycle of each turn it can go. The reason why you can manually shift your task group initiative to lower numbers is due to it making it easier to make formations if you can control what order your ship's move cycles proc.