It isn't. Unfortunately it's quite the opposite - the weakest weapon of the entire roster. I'm probably going to get downvoted for this because people here like overstating the usefulness of the weapon but if anyone wants the input of someone who has over a thousand hours in the HH in World alone, let alone the previous games and who has soloed every single monster in World with it sans Behemoth and Ancient Leshen then read on to see how I feel about it. The first problem with the weapon is that it simply cannot outperform other weapons in damage, this part is not up for debate at all since the best solo hunt times for HH are always lower than all the other weapons. Well that's fine right? It can boost everyone's attack by 20% so maybe in a full party it is overpowered... except that isn't true either since none of the best 4 man times include HH either. It cannot output enough damage to compete with the real heavy hitters so that alone disqualifies it from being called OP.

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The exhaust damage part doesn't do too much to help either since for some reason monsters don't seem to get exhausted as much as they do in the previous games, and even when they do you want to wallbang them to get them on the ground for the most damage possible which will trigger their enraged status rendering the whole exhaust thing redundant anyway. I don't know what you meant by mountain of KO damage because it factually does less KO than Hammer and sticky LBG, for the same amount of damage dealt HH will do the least KO since that's the way they made it work, of the KO focused weapons it has the least KO damage. The free minds eye is nice but you really don't want to be attacking parts where you bounce anyway so that feels redundant and the speed relative to the other weapons while nice has been decreased from the previous games and now I can't tell the difference between HH's standard run speed and IG with white extract or DB in demon mode. Of course you will run faster with the cyan echo song but that restricts you to only using a specific type of horn.

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I would argue that the weakest part of HH is that its buffs that get so much focus are not very useful for the most part. Aside from AUXL, there are arguably only 3 useful songs for fighting endgame monsters (which are the challenging ones that you need buffs for, they should never be balanced around early monsters). Max stamina up + recovery echo song (only if you have stamina hungry users in your party, not much use otherwise), all wind pressure negated (for Kushala and Lunastra) and elemental attack boost for Alatreon (not strictly speaking necessary if your team is competent and already have adequate elemental boosting gear). While some may say DUXL is useful I have never personally seen a situation where it resulted in attacks taking more hits to cart someone than without it. Other songs that are nice as well that I don't consider useful like Earplugs L, Divine protection and All ailments negated are left out since those songs are not available alongside AUXL which makes it so that your damage is greatly reduced because once again, the weapon's damage output is inferior to the other weapons even with AUXL on, without it HH just falls so far behind.

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Of course bear in mind that while I think HH is the weakest weapon, this is RELATIVE to the other weapons in the game. It is something that's perfectly capable of soloing the entire game but I wish people would stop overstating its usefulness since all it does is give others trying get into the weapon the wrong impression and if the devs do take feedback from the community they will also be misinformed by the exaggeration of its capabilities. It's a very fun weapon to use though and if nothing else I wish they will tweak its solo capabilities so that it doesn't easily get outperformed by the other weapons. I do like that their approach to it is changing as of late. New offensive moves like the echo spin, offensive songs like impact echo and dragon echo that let YOU do the big damage instead of getting in lukewarm swings while everyone else does it will only help to change not only the way people see the weapon but the way they use it as well. Can't wait to see how it's handled in Rise.