The pure problem with the scout is the existence of pulse rifles because pulse rifles serve the purpose of the range that scouts are supposed to be used at. That said, I don't think hand cannons are what they look like. My suspicion, in canon anyway, is that the first hand cannon was carried by a hunter. Finding that he or she needed the stopping power of a scout rifle but the handling and maneuverability of a hand gun for when things got close quarters. The first thing this unknown hunter did was remove the stock and replace it with a pistol grip, then they sawed off the barrel. After practicing with the weapon some they found that ejecting the battery magazine from the bottom of the cut down rifle was both unwieldy and awkward, it was also wasteful as far as space goes. After considering this the hunter decided to replace the capacitor and beam energy projection diode array with a smaller but overloaded array system and instead of ejecting the battery magazine from the bottom of the weapon, they custom designed a cylindrical shaped battery pack which would be held in above the grip of the weapon like an old world revolver, allowing them to quickly flick it open, drop the old pack, and shove in a new one. All things considered I think that in this universe the hand cannon evolved from the rifle rather than the other way around. This does mirror real world development of firearms as the earliest firearms were most likely unrifled cannons meant to fire balls of various sizes, as metal casting technology improved they were able to make these cannons smaller and more narrow, if you look at historical firearms the earliest proto-rifles were esentailly portable cannons. Then the advent of the musket rifle came about, then pistols when people realized that the rifle could essentially be cut off and fired from the hand. Of course these early pistols were so inaccurate they were only useful when fired into a crowd... The early days of dueling it was not unheard of for the two duelists to have the adversary dead in each other's sights and miss each other entirely, which is a large part of why the practice was banned in a time before modern law and order when idiots were usually welcome to get them selves killed. Because they'd usually miss and kill someone else. Anyway, long story short, when the question is which came first, the chicken or the egg, the answer is the egg. The rifle came before the pistol, so the scout rifle came before the hand cannon... I feel like if they remove the flinch physic from scout rifles entirely, and make hcr an intrinsic perk of scout rifles, which is they stagger the enemy badly, they should work... Also I feel like stagger rounds which usually knock the enemy for a loop, making them stumble for a moment, should be applied to crucible in that being hit by these rounds should cancel sprint, making you have to start your self sprinting again, this will widen the window of time people are darting through an open area where normally the scout time to kill isn't fast enough... Which will force people to either actively avoid long fire lanes or take a risk someone is camping them, titans might be able to put up a barricade to provide cover for their team, a hunter might be able to slide and roll dodge across. But if you get caught in the middle of a fire lane that someone is camping with a scout rifle, you absolutely pay consequences for that choice, especially with the fact that destiny's team shot meta means every engagement for a camper is going to be one on two.