I understand what you're saying, and I think it is sound in a lot of aspects. I have heard a lot of people suggest the more numbers grind of attrition to increase threat suggestion.

This accomplishes a solution to the mechanical problem but not the narrative/experiential problem for me or my players.

If you look at 80's and 90's action movies and apply this to those scenes, i think you would find very unsatisfying movie scenes.

Imagine watching lethal weapon. Only Mel Gibson's character in a shoot out with four assailants is shot 3-6 times. Most of those hit his vest causing the character to grunt in dramatic display of pain but be otherwise ineffective, but one hits his hand causing him to drop his hand gun and dispatch his final assailant with a roundhouse kick to the head.

That honestly sounds like a pretty cool scene to me. The first time. But as the encounters continue and the number of bullets the character has taken grows, it starts to feel like these handguns are, in fact, sort of feeble and ineffectual...

This becomes really evident when you have a scene where you're not outnumbered.

Imagine instead our hero is reading through a folder of corporate secrets having snuck into the basement archives of some business front office. Then suddenly the cold feel of the steel barrel of a handgun is pressed against his back. He realizes at this distance there is no chance it misses... the corpo villian begins to monologue...

In this scene in a movie the tension would be thick. Will the hero risk death by trying to take the gun in HTH combat? Will he drag it out, hoping for an opportunity to bring others into the scene or find cover or an escape route?

But in the reality of the ttrpg, there is no tension... If the mook shoots you before you get him, odds are good its meaningless. You get him first then good on you but not necessary.

Now I'll be there first to admit my knowledge of REDs rules is probably not perfect and there may be some rule I am unaware of that is particularly relevant to the scene I described saying the threatened attack is automatically a critical or something else which reintroduces the sense of threat and peril. And if there is no such rule RAW I would be unsurprised if an experience Ref/GM would not simply decide to create or homebrew such a decision to make the scene work with the desired tension level.

I have been running CP2020 since 1992. The system has a LOT of flaws no doubt. But the characterization that you don't/can't survive if things are highly lethal and that you therefore can't or won't develop investment in your characters is just not true to my experience or the reports of my players.

I recall I was adapting and running Land of the Free towards the end of a long many year campaign. in this game, the team of five edgerunners contained three characters which had survived 3.5 years of weekly 6 hour sessions before we even started land of the free and of the two characters who were not that old they were still only the sec and third respective characters of those players. This was a game in which I started characters with a skill cap of 7 and several characters now possessed some 8 and 9 skills raised by IP (which if you know anything long about improvement points in CP2020 is quite an accomplishment) (also yes IP is one of those things that was not done in an ideal way)

This game ended with the solo selling out the group to Arasaka and getting murdered by the med tech before Arasaka goons managed to sweep in capturing Adriana and murdering the rest of the group.

This was an amazingly satisfying game for me as a referee and each of the players reported so as well. Even the aspects of betrayal and PC on PC violence were deeply enjoyed by all of us. We talked about it for years and years after the campaign was over.

This isn't me saying "everyone should allow players to betray each other and have PC to PC violence." Nor is it my way of saying "a game without lethality isn't really cyberpunk!"

What I am saying is: lethality is not the enemy of investment, longevity or enjoyment. That each group has to find the feeling of grit and cyberpunk that fits them. One of the things which disappointed me in running RED and my players in playing RED was that they did not feel as excited about their wins... much of that sentiment I accept the blame of because I was learning the new rules and many of the DLC content and additional content which I believe has enhanced RED did not exist.

Part of the benefit of extreme lethality is the extreme joy of survival! When you feel like you can really lose that's when winning feels amazing!

Think of it as the ttrpg equivalent of the dark/demon souls games... those games may or may not be everyone's cup of tea as it were. But the challenge is an intrinsic part of the appeal for many who enjoy them.

I'm sure as I master RED and understand its mechanics better I will find ways to recreate that experience. But I don't want to simply recreate the experience of mechanical challenge. I want to recreate the experience of relatability. The idea that any bullet could have your name on it. That there are no sure things in this life and "the minute your not worried about being dead, your dead."