They're a weird gun to balance. Think about it, they're a handcannon at a distance in some respects. You kind of hit the nail on the head and say sit back and range the ads. The problem is there's no risk and all reward for that. They can do 1 of 2 things to make the weapon compete with other weapon types. They can make the gun inaccurate - which is against the social contract of a scout rifle. Or they can lower the damage knowing you'll connect every shot. Handcannons had a similar problem in D1 - they had high damage and high accuracy. They introduced bloom to offset the accuracy when you spam the trigger. The reason is, you can fire 4 shots and get a kill while a target moves, but an auto rifle or pulse will miss some shots naturally because of the rate of fire. So the risk was lower on HC and reward was higher than most guns. I think they don't want PVE to be a safe cheese mode. Scout rifles have that potential to be that. So its either make them miss the target more, or lower the damage output overall. My guess is that higher rof scouts will be better on the damage output overall compared to the rest.