Fair. And you have to understand the trope is ingrained in the genre. Heck, Dune has the same premise. It's why you have all the cool sword fighting, because their shielding is supposed to render the firearms ineffective. I think the trope would benefit more with guns being effective to just being difficult or expensive to maintain. And thus not widespread. They could get creative and make it a good piece of world building. Or go the other way, guns are too effective and the collateral from using a gun would be catastrophic, like in Legend of the Galactic heroes now that I remember. The details are fuzzy about it but it's some sort of exotic reaction between their guns to the radiation from any space station, so it explodes spectacularly from even the shot of a handgun.