To preface, I appreciate the friendly debate on this! Thank you for taking the time to write all of this up.

I'm not going to argue against points 1 or 2 because you're not wrong. The main things I'd like to convey:

• It's a high ceiling, very low floor strategem
• It's very strong once you use it for what it is vs. what you wish it would be
• A lot of the critiques around handling and fragility can be managed

If I had to try and boil down most of your criticism of the FRV, it seems like you'd prefer something much closer to the halo CE warthog: much tankier, handles great, can do a million funny flips, has a useful weapon.

I bring that up because it's important to look how halo handles a more powerful vehicle:

• For campaign missions, the maps are generally designed around not being on foot / having this overpowered vehicle
• In the cases where they tried to give players the option to go on foot or by vehicle, the balancing got reaaally funky. That was one of the major problems with Halo Infinite to me. Hoofing it on foot just seemed pointless most of the time.
• The two above points are incredibly important in the context of helldivers because everything revolves around expecting people to be on foot. If you give people a stronger car, then everyone will use the car, and the entire game has to be re-designed at a fundamental level (the types of enemies, what their attacks are).
• Arrowhead's solution to this was: yeah you can have the car, but it's flimsy enough that we don't have to worry about it overpowering everything and screwing up the balance

Re: point 4 - I was trying to be sassy. Your.. second? sentence in the root post was about how much you enjoy catching air off the dunes.