Cruise missiles are considered "okay" for structure bashing, but are generally considered impractical for PvP. Even with good support skills, their flight time and RoF don't make them a viable weapon system.
The Drake is a brick (as far as EHP goes), so its "mediocre" DPS from missiles and their delayed damage application are accepted, since they tend to stay in the fight a bit longer. Winmatar is still FotM, since ACs can hit out to ridiculous range, even if it is falloff, and they don't use capacitor to fire, unlike lasers and hybrids. Couple that with hulls that are among the fastest and most agile, especially when shield tanked/buffered, what's not to like?
Blasters are the preferred hybrid, because of their hull-melting capability. Of course, the hulls that tend to do better with them are armor bricks that have trouble getting into engagement range.
Rails are still the red-headed stepchild, even with the so-called "buff" to hybrids that came with Crucible. They aren't as bad as they used to be, but the general populace still doesn't want to give them a try, because their main niche - ultra-sniper, is really hard to apply in PvP. Arty has much higher alpha, which is great for instapopping logistics, but a heinous RoF.
I'm not a laser guy, but one of their bigger advantages (to my mind, anyway) is not needing to reload, and pretty much insta-switching of crystals for different ranges. I always see comments about "Scorch," the Tech 2 freq crystal for pulse lasers, I believe, that makes them pretty godly. Lasers are pretty effective against shield-tanked fleets, due to the resistance holes.
