That wasn't the implication at all. With enough effort you can make just about ANYTHING work.
The point is, canon builds don't make a lot of sense from a practicality standpoint, and this is mainly because torpedoes in that game are DESIGNED to be somewhat impractical because otherwise it would be incredibly silly to use anything OTHER than torpedoes. It's not just STO, almost all space opera games are guilty of this same illogic when it comes to torpedo weapons: missiles and torpedoes are all heavily nerfed in some way because otherwise unskilled players would use missiles exclusively, as those give them the ability to one-shot-kill more advanced players and completely eliminate the incentive to BE more skilled in the first place. That basically kills the PVP crowd that alot of those games depend on for their revenue and player base. So they have to keep missiles weak and/or useless so that people who put in a shit ton of time and/or money grinding to get a more impressive build can still reign supreme. Another example of this is Elite Dangerous, where torpedo weapons as originally envisioned would allow small ships to wreck larger ones by firing torpedoes three or four at a time. The first revision of the game, they limited the amount of ammo you can carry in a single torpedo launcher (they used to be stored in the cargo bay, now you can only ever carry one per tube and then you have to reload at a starbase). Then they doubled the price of the things, then they limited their effectiveness against subsystems. Torpedoes went from highly practical and effective weapons in the alpha and beta versions to being really expensive gimmicks in the full game, becoming useful only once you complete a long and convoluted side quest in "The Engineers" to have them upgraded.
STO shares the same videogame PVP mechanic that deliberately makes torpedoes less useful than they should be
so grind players can have a good time with it. Getting killed every two seconds isn't particularly fun for most people, but the game is designed so that the solution to "get killed a lot" is to level up over time. If torpedoes worked the way they SHOULD, leveling up over time wouldn't make alot of difference and players would have to invest in point defense systems or more advanced shields, which would kind of mess up the game's internal ecosystem since it puts high end projectile weapons at a premium along with equally high-end defense systems. You have a literal arms race in a market that tops off pretty quickly; can't have that.
The Trek universe, as I said, has different problems: the writers just didn't think of it. Realistically, a single torpedo ought to detonate with enough explosive force to flatten a small city (think of the core detonation from ST09 when they escaped the black hole). If somebody takes your shields down and locks a torpedo on you, you either run away or surrender, because if you get hit, you're DEAD.
Yes, though for entirely different reasons, which makes the effect almost an accident. Even at their current level of performance, they still had to be modified (with the long reload times and limited range) in order to be comparable.
