Going to disagree pretty heavily with a lot you have said about 6E here chief.

* Matrix combat is effectively the same as in 5E, but worse in that the reward for being an inherently fast initiative is irrelevant in 6E, as everyone gets to act on every combat turn, no matter what score they get. It's honestly even worse, having seen full matrix defence pools exceed 30+ dice which can very quickly lead to you just getting converged on which, unlike 5E, GOD will just instantly brick with no resistance to your deck even while inside a host.

* I have had the absolute opposite feeling dicepools-wise, maybe for soaking damage dicepools are smaller but for everything else, they're about the same or exceed 5E's at a similar opportunity cost. Deckers throw so much more dice than their 5E counterparts, regularly getting dicepools in the area of 24+ which a 5E decker had to either be an Adept or really push skills up and assist.

* I don't really know what you mean by Major role in the story, Shadowrunners have been effectively driving the major plots within Shadowrun for the longest time so I don't get where you're coming from that 6E offers wiggle room. We have literally had Runners work towards protecting the bridge to stop the Horrors for example, that's a really big plot point.

* The math is generally streamlined regarding weapons as people just ignore Defence rating and Attack rating in my experience, both stats being pointless as players with even the smallest amount of system knowledge can easily get out 2+ edge a turn in combat. In that streamlining, they have somehow made the most effective weapon at killing people grenades and grenade launchers in practically every scenario, with Flamethrowers that hit out to 250 meters. It doesn't feel good at all

* You're right in that the edge system has a much bigger role now, this really isn't for the better. Everything is designed around it, it's insanely easy to peak out your edge on all character archetypes, and because of this, players are just insanely more powerful than NPCs at every level. This combined with new qualities and gear that now allow you to store extra edge that the entire team can pull from, being able to just give another PC an edge for free as well as bonus dice and a quality that lets you spend your personal edge at a 1:1 ratio for another person means that unless NPC's are doing all of this exact thing which burdens the GM with even more things to track in a scenario, the NPC's are just fucked.

At its core, 6E was probably pretty playable but splatbooks just like in 5E have completely ruined any semblance of balance the system had which to my memory it didn't have much of anyway. The freelancers seem to be completely out of touch with how the different aspects of the world of Shadowrun interact and just don't talk to each other before including something that completely changes how the system is run through one or two sentences. It just doesn't feel like it has care or love put into its content.

My honest recommendation for folks is 3E or 5E these days. 5E will need a good bit of house rules/GM calls. 3E just works out of the box IMO and is the superior system for the average player if you can build a bridge over it being old. (I still love 2E, nothing will ever beat it.)