Missiles and flares - are they useful?

[mr.WHO]

In my starting Elite in the flare dispenser there is only space for one flare.
Now I upgraded to Eclipse nad found it also has only one flare.

WTF? One flare seem like a token effort that any useful feature.

What about missiles? I heard that you cannot rearm them on carrier nor in space so they are also limited to resupply range of nearest ED and SY.

Is it worth to have missile turrets on capships?
Does putting missiles in secondary mount work only for player ship or does your NPC ships use them in secondary mounts?