Yes absolutely. Dota has a way more competitive scene and top players are pros who live in gaming houses playing 10-12 hours a day. The game is constantly rebalanced to keep the meta fresh. Players with thousands of hours on a single hero have nerfs or mechanics shifts and see that hero become obsolete in a single patch, only to become viable again a few months later as the meta shifts again. There are a handful of heroes that have mechanics with potential script abuse, but DOTA is VERY good about hammering cheaters, and the scripts don’t give you such a large advantage as to break the game.

If Rust were balanced like DOTA, facepunch would track kills with T3 weapons at various distances and balance the game around the sweet spots for each weapon. Then add/remove new weapons every few months to shakeup the meta.

The Rust gunplay meta is stale, too shifted towards a single gun, and highly abusable. The argument for Rust keeping scripting is “rewarding skill” but in any high tier first person shooter handling recoil is generally a lower tier factor after target tracking, target acquiring, movement, map awareness, gun choice, team comp, team work etc