Or maybe planned rotation is the goal. Not balance.

Everyone forgets this little fun fact from vanilla destiny. Iron banner 20 auto rifle kills bounties. Bounty was the same for like 2 iron banners. Everyone equipped Suros because it mapped people for 37 damage per headshot. First nerf brought it to 31 or 32 I think. You literally couldn't go into the crucible without it. At least not at my skill level then. Xur sells Suros. Auto rifles get nerfed shortly after. Bungie says they nerf auto rifles 8% in reality it was like 13-14% when all the damage calculations were done. At the end we had thorn and tlw for 6 months along with felwinters lie and blink. Then they added matador and party crasher with Reforging lmao. Now they crush shotguns and are claiming a 8% nerf on pulse rifles. Anyone want to bet it'll be the same 13-14% to originally hit the auto rifles from vanilla destiny and the 7-8% gives auto rifles their 13-14% back. So that would typically flip the meta right? However Bungie has a hard on for damage drop off now which is their interim fix for not being able to balance the weapons. So theoretically this patch might actually work out considering there are 3 different primary weapons with specialty ranges. The only one left out are scouts which most maps aren't big enough for anyway to be effective in the majority of players hands.