Personally I love the number of weapons that this game has and I love that there aren't a million attachments you can slap on each one of them. More for the sake of more is not a good thing and often leads to a final product that is massively unbalanced due to the sheer number of variables and combinations.
In this game you've got blasters that are fairly close facsimiles to the archetypal weapons we're used to in most shooters. You've got assault rifles, SMGs, LMGs, a shotgun, and a sniper rifle. There are a couple that are slightly more difficult to categorize like the T-21 but for the most part these concepts are familiar.
I really appreciate this approach because I don't have to spend ages trying to figure out which of the 15 SMGs is worthwhile and which are complete throwaway trash, which is almost always the case in games that feature so many weapons of a similar type. It reminds me a lot of Killzone 2 or the older Halo games which had excellent weapon balance. I'm not saying the balance is perfect in BF but a few minor balance patches should level the playing field pretty fairly, as opposed to games like CoD where some weapons and attachments will just never feel very useful.
When I see someone complain about there being "only" 11 primary weapons I wonder how many good shooters they've actually played.
