I’m at a similar point. But am also missing Core Computing 8 & 9. Did you complete them before the rebalance? I have ~2e6 compute component bonus from Base2 and am far away from finishing CC8. I used max-1 weapons and can upgrade them to level 110. I can’t see a way to progress significantly further…
Also base carry seems to be partially broken. I usually have boosts in a checkerboard pattern. When I for example have a battle mult bossted by 3 and one boosted by 2 boosters. If I change the one bossted by 2 to a battle/shield building, the boost will increase although it should have been lowered. This is not a penalty issue. The penalty doesn’t change.
I completed almost everything before the rebalances, my base2 is lower. I think your issue may be weapon choice, don't be afraid to retrofit to other weapons nor forget to use your reactor.
for base carry I went base1 optimized for damage base2 optimized for battle mult base 3 max penalty reduction + battle mult. trusting outranging the enemies + 2 deflectors to do the trick, which worked for me till 4/6 after which I just didn't have enough damage output. And now my base improvements are in the realm of years for 1&2.
the normal soft limit is +100%, the soft limit in the challenge is thugs +1000% or 10x. or at least I'm pretty sure it is. You can tell if you're at the soft limit or not by going to the stats and info screen and then looking at statistics and wave clears. It soft caps at 1000 wave clears, so if you have less than that it's a a ways to go yet to the soft cap
