Today there was a discussion in all chat about leveling, and the general concensus was that if you dont have drones or slaves, you're effectively screwed when it comes to leveling between ~20 and ~250. I was just curious if that was what the admins really intended? Do other players have an opinion on this?

I leveled to 200 in the beta without drones or slaves. That was in a hotrod though, so survival was obviously based on dodging shots. Maybe ai at that level just do too much damage for 1 ship to be able to take?

Far from required, you can use many ships with their super special inbuilts with great success against many AI that gives you a very good amount of experience for each kill at that level.

Which ships? As far as I can see, there is practically nothing other than ghostship/wingships to do any significant amount of damage. And it seems more like that's because they're brokenly overpowered rather than because anything is balanced or anything...

but its always easier, and almost always faster to use slaves or drones...

You can use the Wingship and Wingship II to advance quite fast, and then go for a Ragnarock or Inferno. When you can get Piloting 10 then you can have a lot of fun with missiles for capital ships.

Maybe there isn't enough low tech useful missiles/missile launchers to include that here? And the same for fighters?

Using slaves isn't required or the only option. However, it is an option that requires pretty low effort for how quickly it can level you.

How I think of it is: I could level my character using a non-slave/drone method... or I could multitask by doing something else while my character practically auto-levels, then level normally once that method begins to fall off in effectiveness.

Indeed. My main reason for using slaves to level a character is that I use my main Engineer to deploy Armada Charges, and when my alt has reached level 600-700 from level 0, then I have gained about 50-100 levels on my level 2700 main.

Wingships are easy to level in through copper they have a good inbuilt weapon

Its possible. I got bored and made a new character he got from level 16 to 90 something in a Paxinimus, no drones, no slaves, sure took a fuck ton longer then with slaves though. I got from 40 to 140 in 5 hours with pax slaves and a friend.