To me this actually makes no sense in terms of weapon balance! Weapons balance themselves out in the long run and have done since the dawn of the FPS. Normally a high ROF gun with low recoil will have really low weapon damage - offsetting its usefulness. Whereas a Low ROF gun with higher recoil with have really high damage to offset the slow ROF.
In PvP destiny there is no point in choosing the latter gun because the damage will be in line with all other guns in the autorifle class. In short if the Multiplayer PvP weapon "balance" remains the same then the best rifle to choose in multiplayer will simply be a ROF gun with a large weapon mag. (Thats how it stands in the beta at least)
There's a conflation here of two stats: Attack and Impact.
Attack is your damage scaling. A weapon with an attack of 20 won't do shit against a level 8, but a weapon with an attack of 70 will do damage just fine.
Impact is your damage numbers. A weapon has a raw impact score, which is then modified up or down based on the attack of the weapon vs the defence of the person being attacked.
In the cruicible, they flatten out the scaling due to attack and defence, but DON'T alter the raw numbers due to impact. Thus a low rate of fire, high impact gun will still do more damage than a high rate of fire low impact one per bullet, if that makes sense.