Why? Because hand cannons feed an American fantasy (Old West gunfighter), and is loved by the pvp community and those at Bungie who were partial to pvp. Up until last winter, Sandbox and Weapons Design were led (and controlled) by Jon Weisznewski. When you’d listen to him talk about Destiny he’d almost always only talk about Crucible and and how his vision for it was this e-sport level game of map control and team shooting. IOW vanilla D2. He and the people he surrounded himself with also had a clear bias towards precision weapons and hand cannons. So the game was always being tuned so that they were the weapon class that rewarded skilled play the most...and any weapon that threatened their position got quickly nerfed. But now that Weisznewski and most of his lieutenants have left the company (since e-sports are never going to be a part of Destiny’s future...at least not as an arena shooter)....it’s going to be interesting to see how this impacts how the Sandbox is managed. Luke Smith has already warned us that a nerf to supers and how damage stacks is incoming as well as a buff to SRs. (Which were being held back to [i]promote[/i] more aggressive play) It’ll be interesting to see if we finally get a sandbox where all weapon classes are viable and Bungie stops thumbing the scale in favor of certain weapons and a particular designers preferred style of play. Which we’ve had five years of under Weisznewski and his allies.