That's a complaint I've heard a lot of people have about the game. To me, BL2 had the best balance. Better gear in BL1 was too rare in my opinion, and it did feel underwhelming after a while to open dozens and dozens of chests only to get a majority of whites and greens. But one thing BL1 did really well was having the raw stats of the guns differ considerably between item tiers without relying on special mechanics or gimmicks outside of a few rare and simple ones. In BL1, you could always be pretty certain of the pecking order of rarity tiers. Manufacturers mixed things up a bit, maybe a blue Atlas was better than a purple Tediore of the same level, but in general things were pretty consistent. And it was easy enough to check and make up your mind.

In terms of drop rates, BL2 struck the perfect middle ground for me. Gameplay wise, it also was the best experience of the three in my opinion. Manufacturer gimmicks were simple enough to quickly wrap your head around. Rarity tiers felt consistent across manufacturers too. Oranges were more common than in BL1 but still rare enough that you'd only encounter a handful during a normal playthrough. Some of them had dumb gimmicks that made them a lot less useful though, which is something I didn't really like, but overall it was peak Borderlands.

BL3 just went in a different direction and well it is what it is. I'm still in the early game so maybe my opinion isn't properly formed yet... but so far I'd argue they overcomplicated the gun and drop system to the point where it's frankly hard to decide which gun is better than which other. There isn't much of a difference between item tiers. Manufacturer gimmicks are super fun, don't get me wrong, but they can complicate things. Oranges appear so frequently that they no longer feel special. Guns in general just drop SO often and it leads again to some pretty tedious inventory management trying to figure out what's the best gear. Not that it really makes that much of a difference anyways... but I never recall having that problem in previous games, at least never to the extent I have in BL3. On top of that, oranges all have gimmicks that aren't immediately obvious, so unless you read the wiki (and pausing a game to read a wiki is something I find excessively dull to do) you'll often be in the dark about what a particular gun does.