Missions & Complexes

So here's the situation: I'm playing EvE with two characters - "main" is the pvper/missioner/explorer/just about anything not related to industry, while the "alt" is an industrial character centered around mining, reprocessing, trading and hauling. Recently, I've started building her towards missions as well, but I'm torn what weapon system to go for. This is what I'm thinking:

1. I move around, from Caldari to Minmatar to Amarr space and beyond, facing pirates of all factions. I'm not sure Amarr would be the best idea due to lasers' very specific damage type. On the other hand, with Retribution, they are starting to get a very viable drone boat line, to be considered as alternate damage type. Still, other races are clearly superior in this area.

2. My main is highly specialized in caldari and to some extent gallente ships, which is something I'd like to avoid on the alt. This limits my choices to Matari and Amarr. Do note that another reason I don't consider Gallente is that I hate most of their ship looks, especially the drone boats.

3. I prefer to fly smaller, faster ships up to the battlecruiser size on my main, which tends to require more active gameplay than a huge sitting brick that shoots from 200 km away. The missiles also tend to require volley counting and manual interrupts, so a logical choice for the alt would be drone boats (and thus the Amarr), however, trying out the Matari boats, I have a clear preference for their speed tanks, especially on "in your face" ships like the Stabber (yes, I know it's not the most popular of ships). To pile it up a bit, while Amarr have quite a few new drone boats coming for tech 1, the tech 2 is still heavily missile based, bringing me back to where I am with the main. The Matari remain true to their Projectile focus with secondary missile systems. This seconds in training time - Matari seem more skill intensive to start with, but in the long run, I feel Amarr will require more support skills to perform better.

4. Loki vs Legion - it seems that the Loki is more versatile and mixes better with a Tengu. I doubt I'll be going for another T3 anytime soon, I'd like to mix it up a bit, but it's good to have options.

5. Oracle vs. Tornado - a much more important comparison in my book, as either is an option for the future. These both seem to perform very well, one with dps, the other with high alpha, but I feel that Oracle is just sexier, it reminds me of Mass Effect's Reapers :D

6. It may not seem important to min-maxers, but it is to me, so here's the last point: I prefer the looks of Amarr ships overall, from the tiny Punisher to Prophecy to aforementioned Oracle, even their industrial ships look amazing. However, looking at the new Stabber/Vagabond and Vargur coming next week makes my jaw drop - if that's the future of Matari ships, I want one. Of each.

As you can see, I am honestly as torn as I ever was. Any bright ideas which will give me more bang for the skill points? :)

Not everything is about pure maximization of isk production - if I wanted that, I'd get a Dominix / CNR and call it a day. What I'm looking for is a combination of fun (which you can't help me with), versatility and essentially "bang for buck", i.e. if I decide to do more than missions with that character, that I won't have to spend half a year training skills in a completely opposite direction.

I was resistant about the idea of the Navy Raven for my PVE alt, but I've found it to be a fun ship to tinker around with and it'll make you a lot of ISKies. On the other hand, if you want your mission Alt to fly in smaller ships, moving around and such, Tengu or Nighthawk is probably the way to go (barring a switch to a different racial set of ships). Tengu trains faster and is a very fine PVE ship (that could be used to compliment your exploration efforts), but ti has to be concerned about web/scram elite frigs and costs a boat load of ISK. Nighthawk is a longer training queue, but that drone bay is so nice and it has awesome resists so a fraction of the cost of the Tengu.

If you like the idea of the Mach, train for Mael first and skip the Loki imo. The Mael is a pretty darned good mission ship in its own right and fits in nicely on your way to that Mach.