No, the problem is ABSOLUTELY damage. The fact that you had to use Proto Swarms as the baseline for your argument is as much proof of that as anything else. STD and ADV swarms are, in most cases, not even worth mentioning on the battlefield and with the way that Swarms scale as you level them up, even at ADV you'll have trouble taking out any sort of LAV let alone being a threat to any Militia tank someone takes 2 seconds to call out on the field.

1. AV needs damage done to vehicles reflected as a WP bonus to further incentive their continued use.

2. Damage for STD/ADV swarms needs to be raised SIGNIFICANTLY in order to compete with the proto variant. There is a MASSIVE 50% bonus to damage going from STD -> PRO, this is unprecedented when it comes to literally any other weapon in the game. Toss the +1 Swarm per tier thing and just raise base damage of the 4 base swarms as you level up, keep PRO where it's at in terms of overall damage and make STD and ADV much closer to that base.

If by that you mean standard swarms would fire 6 missle per shot then I would agree, as then the isk cost would be well worth throwing 5 av swarmers (And temporarily cripple your team against the 13-15 infantry vs. your 11 infantry) at them if each suit costs 8k each.

Again, the issue isn't damage, but the application of such. These numbers are to give a general idea. I won't run numbers for all possible combinations of Swarms vs tanks because that'd take forever. But they aren't as bad as people make out. The issue, again, is that tanks can easily escape that damage.

As an infantry example, the DPS of HMGs before the hotfix was perfect. The reason it suffered was the application of its dps, which was hotfixed.

All an increased cool down would do would have the tanker recall instead of waiting for cool down. The duration needs to be shorter. Tanks don't leave the redline with their hardeners on and only stay out as long as they're active. They activate them IF and WHEN they start getting hit by AV. At that point they have the length of their hardener to neutralize that threat. Only if the hardener goes down and the threat is still present do they need to retreat. The rest of the time they can just keep their figure on the god mode button without using it.

I understand what you're getting at and would agree if not for the passive reps. There are times when tanks just seem to passively rep through my 2 clips of ammo before moving on. No hardeners are required for a tank to ignore a SL.

What bugs me about the SL is that they are too easily countered. All that it takes is a hardener or a repper. Just about every tank runs at least one of these things. I've sat there with 2 other blueberries just desperately pelting a tank with SLs while it sat killing others with hardeners and reps. This is unacceptable. It should not be "one module to counter one infantry". Right now a tank's survival is not necessarily dependent on the pilot's skill when it comes to AV. It all comes down to whether or not the SL pack can be within 100 meters when it's hardener runs out.

The situation you outlined is militia tank, unfitted, sitting there taking a beating from a proto SL. This never really happens in practice so I don't really concern myself with how quickly I could or couldn't destroy it.

I appreciate you taking the time to run some numbers and I realize you acknowledged that you only ran them for this scenario. I would suggest someone takes this to the next level and includes a module of some sort (rep/hardener) as this is the case that people see most often. To base an opinion about AV based on a scenario like this would be like basing an opinion of the flaylock on a situation in which someone stands still to take the direct impact shots.

The point of hardeners is to neutralize AV damage. The issue is tanks can run multiple hardeners to bypass the cooldowns. Limiting one hardener per vehicle, and having the same uptime and cooldown throughout the tiers, would go a long way to fixing this.

So if you were to rephrase you OP, swarms damage is fine if all the following are true:

STD gets 6 missiles
Cool downs take twice as long
Vehicles can't be called in for 2 minutes after return (which wouldn't work because you call before you recall)
Only one hardener per vehicle.
Reduce tank speed

Is that the base we are working from now?

That's what my point is. Tanks can too easily avoid swarms. The problem is swarms cannot apply their dps to a tank.