It would have been more dicey, especially if I was running drone defense instead of cloak but bombs do hurt Zoltan shields so I probably would have been fine long enough to break it and attack the weapons rooms. That said I did have maxed out engines/shield and the bosses burst laser/phase 3 special never got through my shields before I locked the ship down but of course the RNG could have played out differently as it has it the past ><. The bypass made it a very relaxed experience though to be sure, it's pretty fun that there is some variety to what you can do to win even on hard, even the AI repairs make it possible for you to beat it without a single direct hull damage weapon if you can get enough boarders over killing systems over and over. Which I had to do on phase one because I figured a stun bomb would be more useful than the flak at that point.