The reason is the diminishing return behaviour exhibited by shield hardeners, that's not matched by the extenders. Thus putting in 5 regoliths is exactly 5 times more shield than putting in 1 regolith. The rig and low slot bonus to shield adds up considerable bonuses over the entire 5 regoliths, which comes up to impressive values. Let's take an illustrative example with mostly fictitious numbers to explain the phenomenon :

Take an imaginary ship, 10k shield, 10 hp/s, 30% resistance to all. If you add a general hardener to this ship you will go from 30% to 40% resistance, say. This means that you need to receive 18.2k damage instead of 14,3k damage to get killed. If on the other hand you put on a 2k regolith, you will need to receive 17,1k damage instead of the original 14.3k damage. Clearly the active tank is better in this application. However, if you add 3 general hardeners your resistance only climbs to about 55%. Thus you will need 22.2k (10/.45) damage to be blown up. Had you instead added 3 regoliths, you'd need 22.8k (16/.7) damage to be blown up, making the regoliths better.

Now add two shield rigs and a bunch of reactor controls in the low slots all adding both shield hp and regen and soon enough the 83hp/s shield regen actually does more to insulate you from damage than the shield hardening, because in any application where you're expected to receive 200dps a 83/s is equivalent to a 41.5% shield resistance which of course stacks without penalty with anything.

All this adds together to my Ferox being able to just sit with a pair of sleeper cruisers and tank them indefinitely 200km away from the boxes, while someone in a nimble heron loots to their heart content. Or at least so the theory goes.

With the Gallente Drone boats there just aren't many differences between the Navy Vexor and Myrmidon that come out in the Myrimidon's favor. The Myrmidon bonuses drone damage and hitpoints. The Navy Vexor does that plus bonuses drone velocity and tracking. That drone tracking bonus means you can kill most things with medium drones or heavy drones. I've cleared the better parts of some L2 missions with my laptop off and light drones flying. Drone tracking isn't a common bonus, but it does contribute a lot.

There isn't much chipping at things this way. Drones eat ships and wrecks get looted, at some point ships run out and switch to salvage drones, keep looting wrecks, time flies. Completed missions pile up. The Medium Turret Gallente ships, this might be different after this turret buff, but they just seemed to be a little bit off on optimal range for the sort of sniping that makes the Ferox kick ass. The Ferox is a premier mission ship and pvp ship, while the Brutix and Thorax have to load up on blasters and try to hugbox people to death. The only thing more painful than missioning in a blaster ship is missioning in a slow blastership.

I summary Gallente T1 ships ranked-----------

Cool: Algos, Vexor, Dominix, Catalyst as a suicide ganker

Not bad: Atron, Incursus

Acquired Taste: Navy Megathron

Kind of a pain but has a niche: Megathron

teh suck: Myrmidon, Navitas, Maulus, Imicus, Clestis, Exequeror, catalyst for anything else

Mistakes: Combat fit Iterons

Urethral Sounding with a Mill cut Bastard file

Thorax, Brutix, Hyperion

I'll throw out that for the player who decides to be an exoticism and play Gallente (because abandoning hippie governments is teh rox) Drone Interfacing to III or IV is essential. Completing and Salvaging/Looting L2 missions in half an hour or less becomes the norm (and somewhat afk-able if you pick the Navy Vexor [for the tank that survives random logoffs]). Other than the tremendous improvement in tank the Navy Vexor (proveded you harden it the fuck up) offers over the Vexor, I don't know of a Gallante Navy ship that is worth it over the plain version at all (Navy Megathrons are the suck at anything other than being commoditized for trade and bonuses on the Navy Dominix are a negative).

Maybe Gallente hybrid ships have PvP uses (The Catalyst, Thorax, and Hyperion are suicide gankers wet dreams), but they categorically suck at PVP. An Algos destroyer can clear L2 Missions faster than a Thorax cruiser by virtue of carrying flights of both killing and salvaging drones. The core tenet of Eve that all ships will be killed eventually is magnified in all of the Gallente Gunships which seem to have been designed with suicide as their φύσις in the most Aristotelian sense I can be informed of.

Your analysis of hauling is spot on. It isn't very profitable. It actually takes much more than twice as long if you afk. If you carry anything of more than nominal value through Jita you will be targeted and if you afk you will be shot at risking all of that collateral. The only reason to haul is you have dreams of piloting a boss ass freighter and you like truckstop blow jobs (the latter isn't a bad thing as long as no broken, sharp meth mouth teeth are involved).