Well, there’s a step further you can take that.
Hits with penetrating weapons reduce the armor threshold down so lower penetrating weapons can now penetrate, effectively cascading the armor class across the entire spectrum of weaponry. The remainder of the fighting occurs at the lowest tier: high-dps-low-penetration weaponry. Throw in the ridiculous tribe hulls, and now you have an unusual emphasis in masses of “small arms fire” with very few supporting penetration weapons. (Many of my fleet philosophies consider laser/pulse fighters or ion cannons as “infantry”.)
Of course, on the other end, you occasionally see impenetrable armor baffle ships in front of tank fleets, which do really ugly things to the driving AI because they take so long to die.
Something stinks in the current armor model. Personally I think at the very least that block percentage should drop with damage, not penetration threshold. It seems weird that it’s viable in-game to build ships (even tribe ships) without any armor at all.