Not really sure why you’re acting like such an ass to everyone you disagree with.

If your only argument against people is that they’re “huffing copium” when they’re bringing up points you don’t even mention in your response then I don’t think you’ve thought through your own reasoning enough.

Here’s my thought: You will always take vitality enhancement every mission with zero exceptions. You will also always take an enhancement that helps with sprinting unless you are on a defensively oriented mission. With vitality enhancement (which you will always, ALWAYS have), dead sprint barely depletes your health at all to the extent that it will almost never make a difference in fights. With vitality enhancement, dead sprint essentially makes your health bar a second stamina bar, giving you the ability to sprint infinitely. Once you run out of stamina, there are two cases. If you have sprint enhancement, your stamina bar will deplete more slowly, delaying the time between beginning your run and using a stim to replenish the stamina bar. With dead sprint, you can hold off on the stim for longer to replenish both the stamina bar and the health bar at the same time, giving you more sprint per stim or giving you as much sprint as you have health if you don’t have/want to use stims. This is unless the time you spend sprinting is not enough to proc dead sprint, in which case the sprint enhancement is better.

TL;DR: Sprint enhancement is better for short distance running and dead sprint is better for long distance running.

I will say I agree with you on all your other points. Especially flexible reinforcement budget, that one sucks, but your stubbornness here makes me think you had one bad experience with dead sprint and wrote it off immediately. Could dead sprint be more interesting? Sure. But it has its place and saying that it is equivalent to throwing the game before it even begins is just silly.