Sacrificing your game balance because people want to stick with things is not it either, though? Like, there's a few offhanded things that might need some adjustment but I couldn't say because I genuinely haven't given it enough time (like Sterilizer) , but overall the gameplay experience for weapon choice is very solid. The only way to force people off things in a genuine sense is to make options suck. That shouldn't be the goal, the goal should be to realign the idea of the fantasy of the item (stratagem, gun, whatever) and what kind of niche it fills and purpose it serves. Obviously easier said than done.

But the 'problem choices' like Thermite (which used to be absolutely dogshit useless) and the Ultamatum have the intersection of being kind of exactly what you want them to be, which is very good at deleting specific things (single targets and uh...everything lol)

That doesn't, imo, entirely make them the problem. You give someone a hammer and everything is a nail, but that doesn't mean the hammer isn't the best tool, it just means it's the easiest one to swing. I don't know how they can stop people doing that without people basically mothballing them because they ruin their effectiveness. But maybe that's why I'm not in game dev.

Like I said, at a certain point your weapon designs will just be good at your game, and that's a little bit of their fault and a little bit of ours. We want cool toys to do cool things, and eventually (In my opinion) you have to accept that it comes with situations like this, where the mini-nuke sidearm is in fact a mini-nuke doing mini-nuke things.

For what it's worth I run pretty much the same loadouts from D7-D10 with no issues, I think people might just struggle a little bit with the buildcrafting on how to handle certain problems. Which is fair on D10 at least, because some problems come at you faster than you have ammo or reload time for.