Flak and Lockons everywhere, flying is not fun anymore

No; problems solved to your satisfaction. Others will have other ideas of course.

But what does the score mean in real terms? It's completely unimportant as far as the battlefield is concerned.

So you don't want to help your empire by using your ESF to reducing armor and infantry presence from the battlefield, you just want to get kills? Nothing else matters then?

You are only a free kill to anyone who pulls a burster if you don't react to the fact you are taking damage and sit there long enough for a single equipped, burster max.

You are only a free kill to anyone with a lockon rocket launhcer if you linger longer than 6 seconds within 300m range at full health to a single lockon rocket launcher user.

Otherwise, it is more than one person shooting at you and coordinated enough to make sure you were boned to begin within.

No single AA user can down you easily unless you are slow-reacting or almost dead to begin with.

"Flying isn't fun" = "I need to skill to get kills now, it sucks".

The HE spamming tanks and Liberator spammers adjusted and got better (well some of them), maybe you should try to get better as well. Good pilots still get a LOT of kills. The bad ones have to find some other cheap and broken game mechanic to exploit.