Or just "designed to replace TIE/ln".
Or at least supplement it - though there's plenty of TIE/ln's still in service 4 years later.
And it would appear that the First Order favours the TIE/ln design rather than the Interceptor, as the basis for its own ships.
That is kind of hard to say. The Solar Panels are just one function of the ship and the increase performances of the TIE/IN seemed to make it nessesary to increase them, which certainly is NOT an advantage for the ship. So if they can shrink them back to TIE/LN size or even below, but keep everything else from the interceptor … would you still call the FOs based on the LN design? ;-)
If you take the X-Wing FO than it's somewhere in between LN and IN, but that is just game stats. I honestly don't know how that ship is supposed to compare to anything else, and I don't think we will really get any good answers to that anytime soon. The FO is just another empty box from JJs playhouse, though the SF suggest that 4 laser cannons are not needed anymore, as the chassis supports 4 without trouble while not having them on the FO forward mounted. So I guess the firepower of double cannons as improved enough to make quad-lasers undesirable, must be Kyber-Lasers. Call FFG, TIE/FO should have 4 attack dice … *sigh* … sarcasm, the next best alternative to defeatism.