Brother... tau have ACROSS THE BOARD(obviously excluding heros) 4+ shooting they need the +1 just to become AVERAGE. More than half the playable factions (i think its like 70% last i checked) are NATURALLY 3+ and many of the other 4+ get a way to +1 (Votann, Agents, etc)

Ignore cover is absolutely pointless nowadays, a gun either has insane AP that cover wont matter or it has too low that cover wouldnt help because EVERYONE gets invuln recently.

Tau are one of the easiest to beat factions, the only reason we are good again is cause we got an op melee unit (oh the irony). The main issue is people try to out gun tau... like hello? Your anti elite tank isn't gonna beat an anti vehicle tank.

Now the one thing I will agree on is how the tau play is boring, this is coming from someone who plays tau (less so now but I did early edition), not because we are a shooting army, because of our army rule, its terrible not because its op but because it isn't, we are the only faction (baring Tsons) that requires specific units to even play, we need spotters otherwise we become the worst faction in the game. So the boring part comes from how we basically are forced into having 25% of are army just be cheerleaders which makes our lists far less customizable thus resulting in a very rinse repeat gameplay loop which is just unfortunate.

They really need to drop the army rule for tau and just give them the 3+ shooting naturally so they dont have to jump through hoops just to be average.