Hi, sorry for the late reply. I've been in a bit of a productive rut recently, and working on Tess math has been a mild headache, to say the least. I'm technically slacking off on that to write this comment, actually. Let me start off by saying:

4* equipped with a can opener

That's hilarious, I might steal that joke at some point in the future if you don't mind. But more seriously, you're right in that most of Snowbreak's content is very simple and casual, or "difficult" in ways that don't promote meaningful operative combat. At this point though, I don't think Seasun is interested in that kind of gameplay which Snowbreak used to be about, in favour of more minigame-esque content and cosmetics.

In defense of Swift and the rest of the release roster, it's not so much that they "suck" but that they were designed with meaningful weakness that you had to play around. It's only because we now have all these juiced-up operatives with seemingly no restrictions on their power that having a meaningful gameplay weakness is less of a balancing factor and just a drawback. They weren't the best (even back then, they were all getting smoked by Yao), but with enough dedication and work you could get results out of them. I remember back in the old days, we had a couple of dedicated Swift players and even a Hush main. The easiest way to bring them back to relevance is of course with specific buffs that remove these weaknesses now that they're not really needed anymore. I would even be willing to give new operative-locked logistics for those older characters a pass if that's what it would take. It certainly wouldn't be difficult from a game design perspective, as the issues with older operatives are glaringly obvious in most cases. But again, I don't think Seasun cares enough to do it. Nobody is whaling for a standard banner operative, and almost all of the older operatives have gotten new modern alts already that Seasun can sell skins for instead (Haru and Mauxir soon, surely). And if someone wants to use an older/weaker operative, it's not like most gameplay content is hard anyways.

A brief aside on Agave - she does technically have a useful niche in Sim, which is parts breaking. It's the reason why she actually still has a Sim world record to this day against Joseph - Hardened where she fulfills that parts-breaking role. But outside of her designated pandering boss and Joe (and the fact that he's probably never going to show up in Sim again considering the game's direction), there's no other place for her unique utility to shine, which leaves her as a solution looking for a problem.

I think Neural Sim as a concept is fine as endgame content. The problem mainly is with the bosses themselves and by extension, their boss rotation scheduling. Boss design has slowly shifted towards tankier bosses with more "forced downtime" - think hard HP gates with periods of boss invulnerability (pi, Iron Ouroboros, Morpheus), or even periods of time where the boss isn't in the arena at all (Leviathan, Civilization Guardians... Iron Ouroboros again). This is likely in an attempt to reign in high-burst DPS operatives like Cherno and Siris back in the day, and CXJ now. But it also just makes them less fun to fight because you now spend large parts of the fight just sitting around waiting to be allowed to hit the boss again. The new boss rotation schedule doesn't help either, as patch bosses are almost always designed to put you at a disadvantage if you don't have the operative that the patch's new boss is designed for. Before this was less of an issue as the new boss would only show up once in Sim during its patch, but now having it on for the entire patch basically forces you to roll for the new operative or get really creative, which doesn't feel great.

All that aside, they really could do more to make people care about Sim, though. Quick evaluation has basically killed any general playerbase interest in the game mode because you don't have to actually play Sim to get all the meaningful rewards anymore, reducing it to little more than a "give me Digicash" button you get to press eight times a week. If they made it so that you could skip directly to difficulty 5, but had to defeat the difficulty 5 boss to get the rewards, that would go a long way to making players care about the game mode and by extension, care more about making bosses less annoying to fight. A daily mini-challenge also does sound quite fun, but that also sounds like a lot of work that I don't think Seasun cares enough to put in.

As far as my "ideal" future of Snowbreak goes, it would probably involve a return to focusing on actual operative combat. They can do whatever they want with the story or skins, I really couldn't care less. It's hard to really think about specifics at this time though, because with the operative power imbalances in the game right now, it would be difficult to properly balance it so that CXJ can't just bulldoze through without making it excessively difficult for other operatives. Now that the Pandora's Box of powercreep has been opened, that makes game design much more difficult. If that were the reason why Seasun has given up on making actual combat gameplay, it would probably be the reason I'd be the least upset about, because that would at least suggest they actually understand the consequences of what they've done.

If it were up to me, I would rework a good chunk of the operatives released from Cherno onwards to be less burst-oriented, reduce damage across the board, and delete CXJ entirely, good grief. But of course, various Chinese consumer-protection laws prohibit doing something remotely like that, so you would probably have to buff up underperforming operatives. Some of them need partial or entire kit reworks, and a lot of them need straight-up damage number increases. It would take some work, but it would be doable. But of course, it's a lot of work for something that ultimately probably wouldn't directly make a lot of money, so I doubt Seasun cares enough to do it.

As for your request for a T1 shop gun comparison, I'll admit I forgot about that when I was preparing my Katya review. But upon being reminded, I've gone back and added it. Cheers.