Anyone think the pirates are overpowered?

As i approach late game - a pirate attack was launched at one of my most defended planets, i laughed at them and ignored them. Then 10 minutes later, the pirates kill the colony, blow through a Full-starbase (Max Hangar, Hull and weapons) - and 20 Guass cannons and 4 repair platforms. 

The pillagers have ridiculous amount of health, they're range covers a third of the gravity well and snipes my starbase, they have more armor than starbases and lvl 10 cap ships. On top of that, almost all pirate ships have nearly 100 attack power including their Garda's which wiped all my bombers. what??

To further emphasise the pirates craziness, in another situation, i had placed a starbase with only trade port upgrades at a Gas Giant world. The starbase was there only to generate money, so a few pillagers fly past it and the starbase dies...

The pirate base guass cannons each are like mini-starbases, i got pissed off at pirates so i sent a massive fleet (1600~ fleet supply worth)at them with about 8 lvl 10 capships, 6 of them were Marza Dreadnoughts with Missile barrage, i had to use 6 simultaneous missile barrage to wipe them out. And then it took about another 15 minutes to kill the platforms using my 30 Orgrovs and 80 bomber squadrons (i kept fleet at the edge) - Note the bombers kept dying and in the end and i lost a lvl 10 Marza (despite having 30 Hoshikos out and about), i just sent my whole fleet to kill the rest and i Razed the planet. 

So again, anyone else agree pirates are crazy? Their versions are 4x to 5x even up to 6x more powerful than the TEC counterpart. I noticed that pirates gradually become stronger, do they stop at some point?