I vote no, at least under the current situation.
Basically because the escort situation, in and of itself, is unbalanced.
Consider:
3 race's escorts are nothing more than glorified phaserboats with an automated plasma-shooting AMD-like device.
2 race's escorts are, due to the gatlings / ESG they use, are either offensive or defensive fighters. Use the gat / ESG for an offensive strike, their primary defenses are down for 1 to 2 turns...
3 race's escorts are both offensive and defense machines, due to the mechanic of the G-rack. Some of them are extra-powerful due to the limited inculsion of Gatling phasers on top of their bombardment-level drone racks & extravigant AMD counts.
Unless something is done to make all escorts either offensive & defensive machines, or the same choice (offense or defense, not both at once) are granted to all escorts, I can't see them being used.
My quickie solution would be to remove the "drone" racks from the G-rack bearing escorts. Therefore, the affected escorts become super-defensive machines like the Plasma escorts, but aren't super-offensive machines at the same time. If a player wants a super-offensive "escort", they can buy already-available drone bombardment ships...
Otherwise, we need to do a major "buffing" to the rest of the escorts. With a simple rule that carries harsh penalties, the Dro-D can be used as an offensive weapon.
The rule that I envision making the Dro-D useful: Plasma players are expressly prohibited from using any drone speed but slow on their Dro-D carrying ships. If a player is cought using faster drones, in addition to being forced to immediately disengage with all associated disengagement penalties, the user will suffer the following additional penalty: 1st Offense: -XX VCs (where XX = 1/4 to 1/2 of a standard VC award or is equal to a large-ship kill). 2nd Offense: double or triple the 1st Offence VC penalty. 3rd Offense: Deletion of account (with all PP gone, back to starting ship & rank) and possible ban from remainder of server.
By using the Dro-D to go with the Pl-D, much like the G-rack and AMD 6 work together, plasma gets super offensive and defensive escorts like the G-rack users. Also, with the Dro-D, it's possible to build "plasma bombardment" ships, FFs, DDs, maybe even CLs or a CA, with 6 Dro-D racks. The Dro-D copies the offensive drone rack's capabilities exactly, to the creation of scatterpacks. Therefore, a 6xDro-D ship can put out, with the racks and scatterpack, identical damage amounts that the hex-flipping Drone ships are doing, and therefore can theoretically enjoy the exact same mission-times (with the handicap of an extremely short-ranged weapon) droners are getting.
I'm not a super-fan of the second proposal, as that makes plasma nothing more than blue-glowie short-range drone users. However, it might be the only way possible to make the game balanced, on just about all fronts. Then there's just the issue getting the Mirak up to better PvP snuff...