As an atlas especially now with the netcode fix as long as the light mech is not significantly better then you, taking out his leg or ct with a single large pulse laser should not be too difficult, every glancing blow to get will hurt them, noticeably.
All thee anecdotal stories of why ddcs are terrible missile boats appear to come from watching bad players do nothing useful hundreds of meters from everybody else... You still have ECM, an lrm boat can use ECM even more effectively then a brawler, as they can still be useful standing far back covering snipers or up in the brawl.
I want you to look at the firepower number given by lrms. It is huge, bigger then anything else. Now, if you tag somebody all of that damage will hit their ct. Literally(cannot remember if this now requires Artemis or not to be fair, by I use it). If you get in a straight up fight with somebody with direct fire weapons, both start firing at once, the ONLY way they will win is by a headshot or minimum range. So, as an atlas is exceedingly difficult to headshot when they know it might be coming, and lrms allow you I torso twist freely whilst firing, all it takes is a little good positioning (and ECM is more helpful then you could imagine, having more medlas will not save you anywhere near as much as having an ECM) and enemies that are not 100% poptarters with ECM cover(everything can be countered right
) and you ddc assault can be far more useful then standard facehug atlas builds.
Ofc now a lot of people say they have lost because they had an lrm atlas miles out from both teams just shooting rocks....well let me tell you now, those players could be put into any mech ever and still be zero help to the team, if you cannot carry them as an lrm boat you would still lose no matter what they had.