You are kind of missing some of the main issues at hand. Yes some nerfs do come about because of them being considered to strong in PvE (such as whisper), but for many of these they are less of a nerf and more of a general adjustment, such as reducing cluster bomb damage but increasing direct rocket damage, or decreasing rapid fire shotguns speed, while increasing shotgun damage in general. So in many cases they don't end up being just straight up nerfs. In contrast most nerfs that are done due to PvP are typically just a straight up reduction of something like damage, it is far less often that it is a decrease in one thing and an increase in another to try and rebalance the weapon type, but rather it is normally a reduction of a stat so as to balance an entire weapon type with other weapon types. Then there is the fact that for a while Bungie seems to have had a lot of trouble with separating changes made to PvP and PvE. There have been plenty of items that were nerfed with PvP in mind and yet the changes applied to PvE as well, this has especially been the case with exotic armour pieces. Now recently it has seemed like this practice has gotten better and Bungie has gotten better at separating the two, but it still isnt perfect by any means. Third there is the issue of vanilla D2, which had a lot of changes and a large number of which were directly pulled from constant complaints about things in PvP. Such as melee, grenade, and super abilities, all of these had their recharge slowed, and damage massively reduced, because they were one of the main sources of complaints for PvP players. In fact you can already see some posts today poping back up, complaining about 1 hit melees, supers going off to often and being to powerful, grenades being spammed. And the same can be said for many of the exotic weapon reductions. Exotic weapons in vanilla D2 were pretty bland to say the least, and guess what was right up there with abilities as the most complained about things in D1? That's right exotics weapons and armour. And surprise those same posts are all over the place once again, now that exotics are powerful again (and you could now lump pinnacle weapons in with them since they are basically exotics in everything except for the colour). People still very much remember these changes between D1 and D2 and they still very much remember why they came about, and so PvP is still very much getting heat from that, because we have seen what constant complaints from the PvP side can lead to.