Rise of the Alpha?

I noticed recently a lot of killmails seem to have Machariel battleships on them, take for example the killmail from Count the Sins post.

And read this entry from Eve News 24:

Northern Coalition. (NCDOT) is for several weeks active in Fountain region. While targeting local inhabitants and renters, their actions forced IT Alliance, the landlord of Fountain, to join the fight and support the locals.
In YZ-LQL (Fountain) IT attempts to destroy modules on NCDOT tower proved unsuccessful as NCDOT forced them to safety of their tower and later cleared a small gatecamp from the station.
Evenings in the fight IT and their allies, Black Star Alliance, Talos Coalition, HUN Reloaded and Blade. brought massive number of interceptors and frigates (approx 60) for tackling of the NCDOT hac fleet. Numbers were around 100 for NCDOT and 340 for IT+co.
Tens of wrecks were around the battlefield, especially at the Z3 gate. Losing 3x times as many ships, the tacklers proved effective as isk ratio was almost equal (IT+co killed 4 lokis). Combination of tacklers and alpha shot battleships had proven lethal and IT scored many more kills in this engagement that in any previous attempts.

(Emphasis mine. )

What do these two things have in common? Well, the Machariel is an awesome alpha shot battleship since it has bonuses for projectiles and Artillery is the alpha shot weapon. A Machariel with seven 1400mm artillery cannons and three gyrostabilizers can pump out an alpha strike of over 12000. Its not only faction ships either; a Tempest in similar configuration can pump out a strike of over 10000.

So why does a ship's alpha strike seem more important right now compared to overall DPS?

With the current popularity of logistics ships, a target primaried by a fleet can absorb a lot of damage when multiple logi ships are repairing him. Ships like the Drake with their brick like tanks can take a few rounds from the enemy and give the logi wing time to target and start repping. There are three ways to overcome this; one is to target and destroy the logi which tend to have equally good survivability either through tanks and range, and another is to get more DPS than the logi can overcome which means the enemy fleet might choose to not engage where you are strongest.

The third method is to hit the target so hard and so fast that logistics lacks the time to respond. This is why Drake Fleets with heavy missile launchers and lackluster DPS can still be deadly: all those missiles landing at once have a high alpha strike. Taking that tactic further, we arrive at the artillery battleships with the best alpha strike in the game outside of capital ships. Hence, the current trend.

The end result for me is that railgun battleships are still poor cousins of the fleet fights. In order for them to have a clear advantage over alpha striking artillery and DPS lasers, on grid warps need to be nerfed so that fleets at ranges farther than 150 km are not vulnerable to short warps by enemy fleets who get easy warp in spots from scan probes.