As a sci captain, I guess I'll put my two cents worth in.
Firstly, I know what you mean (from experience) when you say that you suffer from the "this sounds nice" build; my current build is exactly that because I am too lazy to respec before the free respec that will come with the Romulan expansion.
I agree with Keston (betazoidhalf) when he says that there are two roles you can play as a sci: healer or crowd control. Since you like to crowd control in space and heal on the ground, I will share with you some things that I have found useful. When running in a group (like in an STF), DPS isn't all that important for someone running crowd control. My opinion is to stick to either beams or cannons, not both, with a croniton torpedo on the front. When I run crowd control, I run at a very low weapon power setting anyways, so the phaser beams I have are merely for show. The one thing I will say about skill build is that if you are to run crowd control in space, max out your graviton generator skill and particle generator skill.
When I am running crowd control in space, my best friend are skill combos for added DPS. If I am targeting one ship, I like a gravity well and tractor beam combo: the gravity well does some good DPS if the target is at the event horizon, and the tractor beam does just that. If I am targeting multiple ships, I like to cluster them up with a gravity well and then hit them with some warp plasma, and no matter what I am doing, I always spam my croniton torpedo spread whenever the skill is up. I could go for a while about this, but I won't. I hope this helps a little bit.
