I dont see any reason to play as a big gunner.
1. Nerfed armor piercing ammo and their range made miniguns useless on town control(nowadays we use only sniper rifles and rocket launchers)
2. Autoaim for everyone. Now every single crippler with BB gun can take every single big gunner with avanger minigun or light support weapon. It was common fact before implementing auto aim but today its even easier.
3. Hard to craft and hard to get for lonely player.
Big guns only for masochists?
I've not got all day to read every post, so I'll just respond to the original.
1. The only real difference between when everyone was using Avengers and now is drugs and fast shot. Drugs affected snipers and RL equally, so only real difference is fast shot. RL were equally affected by fast shot being nerfed, so there's no real reason that RL should now be amazing compared to Avengers.
Snipers were always meant to get a nerf from Armour/Helmets reducing the critical chance (or critical roll) and crit defense perks. Both of these things will still happen to reduce Snipers down. Eventually snipers will also get their small nerf to go down to the same level as all the burst weapons did.
When all the new perks come in and we have a reasonable period of the weapons, the drugs, the perks and domination mode (as well as fixes to the flood of caps, awesomeness of mercs, availability of top gear at traders for crap and prices for weapons/ammo that reflect their new power levels) all at the correct levels - then we can have a proper discussion about what needs boosting and what's fine.
Hell, we might even have 3D models and be able to sort out animation speeds to allow single shot DPS builds to work properly

2. Autoaim/run are only good things imo.
3. Prices reflect how good weaons used to be and not the current situation. Next wipe will see prices changed a lot.
If anything else came up in the other pages feel free to tell me
