I hope that guy with the excellent balance proposal for Swarms chimes in.

Also let's not forget standard Dropships. I can actually get my Python away from Swarms right now if I run the moment I hear them, but standard Dropships are entirely too sluggish to outrun Swarms and just die. I'd love to play more of a support role for my team with mobile spawns and scans, but it's pretty damn hard when I'm drowned in Swarms I can't move fast enough to out-turn or outrun.

I'll just give some observations and logical thought here and you can pick it apart at will:
Observation 1. Infantry without AV is helpless vs. vehicles. 100% helpless, you basically have zero chance of anything aside from hiding until they go away.

Observation 2. A single infantry with AV is unable to kill a dropship unless the dropship pilot makes a mistake, and cannot even drive the dropship away in some cases in the amount of time it takes the dropship to kill the AV player (in other words, even with AV, dropship vs. infantry is asymmetrical in favor of the dropship).

Observation 3. Multiple infantry with AV makes dropship piloting impossible.

Logicology of the situation:
Why is an infantry player running AV not able to kill vehicles unless the pilot makes a mistake when the AV player is making himself food for any non-AV infantry by running that AV?

The reason is because vehicles cost so much, if you made them easy to kill they would be not useless, but definately too expensive to run.

So why do vehicles cost so much?

How about we dramatically rebalance things so that 1. vehicles are killable and 2. they are priced to reflect that.

Final comments:
Dropship v. AV is pretty closely balanced in 1v1 right now, but even so its broken because the AV running a fit specifically created to destroy vehicles cannot do his job without the vehicle making a mistake, and if multiple AV are out on the field the vehicle cant do anything at all.

How about we make vehicles expendable?
How do we do this? Well we could try this...
Make the pilot suit.
Tie pilot suit fittings in with how well the vehicle does
Dramatically reduce vehicle prices and make it so AV has advantage in 1v1 combat with a vehicle.
The majority of a vehicle's "cost" will be in the pilot suit (still not as expensive as current vehicles though), so the vehicle pilot essentially can defray costs indefinately unless his vehicle gets blown up so quickly and decisively that he loses his suit as well.
Making vehicles more disposable also helps to mitigate the multiple AV phenomena, where many AV players can make running vehicles prohibitively expensive.

tldr; Vehicle balance in this game is fundamentally broken. Small tweaks arent going to fix it. Breaking the EXPENSIVE = INVINCIBLE dynamic of vehicles may fix the issues, but this probably wont happen, so whatever.

But its ok, you will win in the end because vehicle/AV balance will never be fixed because nobody thinks its a problem that tanks are virtually impossible to kill.

I've had PCs before where a dropship pilot will hover in front of my forge fit and eat 2 full clips of AFG ammo to his face, the only reason I survived was because I was hitting him in such a way to throw his aim off. .

I've seen a Python use hardeners to reduce Swarm damage so much that the shield repped through Swarm impacts. Think it was triple hardened, according to someone on comms.

Oh, it was definitely a Python. He'd buzz in, hardened up, and then missile the roof above C on a 4 point (2 in and 2 out) city map to clear uplinks/distract the lookouts/be a pain in the arse and then fly off when the modules ran low. Occasionally he'd hot drop a Sentinel or two while repping through Swarm salvos.

Niche fit but it did its job.

Not true, a single Swarmer can kill an ADS, unless you want to specify a specific kind of scenario and/or ADS fit.