Agreed, I'm having the exact same issue and it's no fun, I cannot even get a decent force set up before the AI clobbers me.

The thing is, on Easy the AI is worse off than the player- the player is just as capable of grouping their ships and attacking in that way, and when you're on the defensive, you're at an advantage (credit values for defensive structures, HV Guns/Ion Cannons is cheaper than for units) so if you work with chokepoints, and decide when and where you should defend, you'll do fine.

If we reduced the starting forces for the AI, that would generally also mean reducing starting forces for the player proportionally, because every faction is playable and again, the AI isn't getting more than you unless you play on higher difficulty levels. This is especially true in Skirmish, where it's literally just resources that we can control, and the AI, gain, is getting less than you are.

In GC, we'vee actually developed a new system to spawn starting forces, so we can potentially look into giving the AI even fewer starting forces than the player on Easy in the future, but it's a large undertaking.

I don't have the necessary recording devices/software otherwise I would show the mod maker what's happening, it's almost unbelievably disproportionate. I uninstalled and am reinstalling to see if that helps, something has got to give. The AI is easily attacking me from the start with a full compliment of ships and progresses twice as fast with capital ships while on easy mode. I just wish I could pinpoint what is going on. Maybe this next install will fix the issue.

starting my fighters for the first 2 astroids and i get attacked by several fighters and a handfull off corvettes and small frigates in skirmish at easy. its like the ai has an instantbuild cheat active (like "aegis" in AoE2)

Balance is fine, it was a real pain playing my first skirmishes, getting rushed and crushed by the Easy AI, I thought like you that it was "cheatting". It's not, it just pushes you fast by spending its early credits and if you focus on killing the fighters and corvette the AI will just take all the mining asteroids (or whatever their name is) and then it will be superior on credit and it will crush you in a few minutes. When you spawn, just head directly to the mining asteroids and take control of as much as you can, immediatly build a few corvettes/carriers to defend each asteroids and then just defend, get the money, upgrade your base, make bigger ships and destroy the AI. It works very well on easy and medium, I haven't tried yet on hard but I'm pretty sure it works the same way. Credits are the key to winning in skirmish, just get as much as you can and prevent your enemy from doing so.
However, developping an easier AI might be good, since there is a really huge gap between the base game easy AI that just does nothing and waits and the modded easy AI that actually is really aggressive.

natha #5...I know for a fact that the AI is cheating as hell

You can look at the actual difficulty adjustments and see the modifiers for them for yourself. On easy, they get fewer credits and higher buildtimes. On normal, they're the same as you. On hard, they're slightly higher.