Rapid fire scouts are very viable… just not heavily used.

Sorry for the text wall. Hand canons and shotguns are still the most used weapons in the game last time I checked and they pretty much always have been unless there's been a huge meta shift such as the auto rifle meta. There's plenty of viable weapons that are very good, as you said. However they lack the versatility that hand canons and shotguns as a combo have. Especially on stompees hunters or top tree dawnblade. That is the difference between viable and "good". This isn't to say that I disagree with you, this is just my understanding. Fusions act as a counter to shotguns on paper but in my experience using my zealots reward, rapid fire frames are not consisten enough to be an effective shotgun counter, especially not against chaperone. Main ingredient works fine, that's another versatile weapon, but shotguns have few effective counters. A shotgun ape need only hold forward and slide or jump, etc while the one trying to stop them needs to hit all their shots very quickly or they most likely die. Shotgunning is extremely easy, hence they're the best special weapon in the game overall. Hand canons are good at a variety of ranges which is different from things like pulse rifles. Sure you can use pulse rifles up close but for me at least, its harder to use a pulse rifle in closer quarters than it is to use a hand canon. Mid range hand canons are still pretty good and they have the advantage over every other weapon type because they only need 3-4 shots to kill depending on accuracy and you can peek shoot more effectively than any other weapon type bar scout rifles which as you said, aren't in a good spot.

Personally I think 340 pulses are a lot stronger than people give them credit for. They have an incredible damage profile for peek shooting (2 bursts) and their optimal ttk is in line with SMGs and sidearms rather than other ranged primaries (0.67s vs 0.8-0.9) My favorite at the moment is legal action with surplus, rampage, arrowhead brake, steady rounds and range MW. It hits full damage out to like 46m (way way more than messenger or any hand cannon) and because of surplus it has very high handling which makes it useable at close ranges. On top of that it’s one of the few pulses in game that hits 100 recoil direction with just arrowhead. Which frees up the mod slot for rampage spec, Icarus or QA sling. Making it even more well rounded. THAT ALL SAID You are right that HC shotty is the best overall combo. But most of that is arguably because of map design, and the fact that hand cannons are a solid choice on any map, where as other primaries have more niche roles. So players focus on mastering hand cannons, because it’s easier to learn one gun that can do almost anything pretty well than it is to fully master all the guns and always have the best loadout.

Wow, civil conversation... crazy. Yeah you raise good points and I'm inclined to agree with you. I need to try my Legal Action again, I have an arrowhead brake, heating up/wellspring roll I've been meaning to use as well as another I was using a little bit. I'm starting to get used to pulse rifles again but I've been spending too much time trying to learn to use hand canons well to keep up with everyone else or spending too much time with a special weapon in my hands because infinite ammo and easy kills are hard to pass up, but that's a different matter entirely lol.