I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
As long as Bungie tries to balance PvP and PvE weapons in the same light, there will always be a problem. It's been like this since the game came out. I think by now they realize that in hindsight that might have been a mistake.
You have to give them credit initially, though. Normalizing the damage and defensive ratings in normal Crucible is a great idea on paper. But it doesn't get go much further than that.
They're pretty close to balancing primaries. Assuming perfect crits there's only 4 crazy outliers:
The Last Word (0.26s TTK), Thorn (0.36s+DoT), Hawkmoon (0.01/0.40/0.83s depending on luck) and Red Death (0.67s).
Everything else in the game is in the 0.8-1.06s range, with varying accuracy and range tradeoffs to balance them out.Even without taking Exotics out of the game entirely, doing something about the above 4 weapons would literally make every weapon class viable. In a game with hundreds of weapons, it's a shame to let 4 dictate the whole show.
I know there's more to balance than TTK, but we can safely use that as a proxy for the general effectiveness of different weapons. Like an Auto Rifle's 1s TTK assumes full crits, which is far less likely than a triple HS on a hand cannon, which artificially makes it look like they're closer than they would be in real life. But it paints a good picture of how insanely superior the big 4 are, and how comparatively bunched up together everything else is.
Special Weapons are trickier. I remember at launch how the special weapon meta relied heavily on shotgun+melee. Even then people complained, but the one-shot situation now is just bad. To be fair, Fusion Rifles were the original bullshit-range one-shot. They've been taken care of. One-shot shotguns will stick around. They just need to cut the range where this works, Shot Package notwithstanding, in like half.