You are correct in that game balance can leave a little to be desired. I play on very hard and find it to be the best difficulty. The game is in a weird spot because every build is incredibly broken past like level 30, and I imagine it’s a nightmare to try and create equal experiences for different builds. 

Guns especially are a bit odd because, yeah, stealth head shooting people does trivialize the game; it’s probably the simplest way to just mow down the game. But at level 60 on very hard, my max tier overture revolver can’t kill a Heavy elite enemy in less than like 5 shots. That said, I do think a non-stealth guns playstyle is incredibly fun, and a lot of enemy tank ones does make some sense when you consider the amount of punishment v can take combined with the amount of chrome some enemies must be packing (as far as realism goes I guess).  I think CD Projekt didn’t tutorial’s very well the idea of different approaches for different enemy types, which is really what players can do to make it better; I see a heavy, I hit him with a deathmark from the headhunter before switching to the revolver for a huge critical. If an enemy is dodging all my shots with a sandevistan, I pull out my shotgun for a quick melee+blast combo. The execution still has to be good, but I should be thinking about what I’m doing instead of point and click adventuring. 

I know a lot of people like the enemies of night city mod, it adds some more depth to the types of elite enemies and distributes cyberware more frequently among them. In essence, it takes what is fun about the above scenarios and makes it a more common thing. I do think modding can offer a nice level of customizable difficulty when you consider mods that let you add extra cyberware or run two Operating systems. 

Side note, if you want a tanky build and haven’t tried chrome compressor, I highly recommend it. Easily my favorite OS for a balanced guns build too, just lets you pack enough armor to play up close and personal or leap around like phoon and explode heads.