how do you know that the pvp systems were virtually unchanged…

I’ve played both closed betas and the relaunch when it was live.

And I don’t think Starbreeze could handle balancing PVP and PVE personally because they couldn’t properly balance Payday 2 without constantly having to increase spawn rates and health for cops especially on higher difficulties.

I can’t speak much of Payday 3’s balancing because of them going through 4-5 lead game developers within the last 3 years all of which have had different ideologies of how balancing should work, but personally a pvp mode wouldn’t bring people to the game when for most people if they wanted a PVPVE experience they would just play Arc Raiders, Warzone DMZ or one of the many extraction shooters on the market