T5-U SHIPS - NOT THE ANSWER PLAYERS ARE LOOKING FOR
When I see threads like this I am always reminded of one thing, and that is we haven't actually seen any stats for the plain old T6 ships yet. We have seen stats for the T6 Intel ships which are T6 with bells and whistles but the plain old vanilla T6 hasn't been revealed yet.
I am pretty sure when we see the stats for those our T5-U ships will be slated for being to powerful compared to the new shinies which will be deemed pointless.
I agree, I think it might be wiser to wait and see what the final implementation will be like when Delta Rising goes live. The way things appear on paper are often not an accurate representation of what they're like in the game. I've also found that the way Cryptic presents some of the information is sometimes confusing (to me, at least), so all of this might just be a case of them not conveying the new upgrade system as simply as possible.
Personally, I think the T5-U sounds more like a tier of its own that's parallel to T6, rather than something that's halfway in between or in any way obsolete. That's just my perception based on what I've read so far, but I could certainly be wrong.