Those are just about the only justifiable changes.

In air accuracy Aim assist Recoil direction Range And flinch more like it.

In air accuracy is garbage excpet for 180s. Everything else needs Icarus. Range is 100% fine. It isn't hard to close the gap in this game. Every auto kills faster. (You just have to flush out peak shooters.) Every pulse kills faster and several have similar range. Some even have more. Recoil direction is also fine, considering a max range hand cannon has low stability in general, with the only exception to that being Palindrome. Give and take. Low range and low stability is why 140 RPM hand cannons were dead on console in Forsaken. If you weren't using Luna's, you were using another 180 like Trust, even though it killed slower. Putting low recoil direction on top of that is overkill and you know it.

So you just want hand cannons to stay meta? There has to be some kind of trade off for all the benefits there are to running a hand cannon. Leaving it as it's at now is an ace of spades meta until something gets nerfed or buffed.

I literally never said I wanted hand cannons to remain meta. I even said an aim assist and flinch nerf are justified. In a hypothetical perfectly balanced sandbox, the meta will be determined from [i]inherent strengths and weaknesses[/i], how it works with and combats Destiny movement, and user preference (gonna ignore that last one for the sake of more objective discussion). In a balanced sandbox, hand cannons will ALWAYS peak shot the best. They will ALWAYS teamshot the best. They will ALWAYS perform the best in the air. They are hand cannons. That is what they are designed to do. Regardless of range, stability, aim assist, etc., they will perform the best in these areas. On top of this, it just so happens that in Destiny, the movement capability means that instantaneous burst damage will ALWAYS be better than sustained damage, hence why autos had to be blatantly OP to be meta and why shotguns still outperform fusions, even after 4 nerfs. So [i]in a balanced sandbox, people will tend towards instantaneous burst damage weapons like hand cannons to combat enemy movement and synergize with their own[/i]. Honestly if another primary outshines all those [i]inherent[/i] benefits, that is a red flag. In a balanced sandbox, hand cannons will trend towards, or be at, the top. And then there are drawbacks. They have the largest TTK shift if they miss. They have either low stability and high range or the reverse. They will have an average or slow TTK. Their handling is not great. Up close they get beat by faster killing primaries. There are risks to hand cannons, but they're offset by the aim assist being too strong. In short, hand cannons will be at or near the top in a balanced sandbox due to just the base design on Destiny movement and the instantaneous burst damage they deliver. If you just want something else to take their spot, you aren't interested in a balanced sandbox. I'm not saying what we have is perfect or even balanced. A couple things needs help. But dethrowning hand cannons "cause I feel like" or "I don't like hand cannons" is not in the interest of balance. And if you'd rather just have steep, sudden meta shifts, that's one you. Just say that and then that's that.