D-Shear

It's exactly the opposite: Shieldgating is the only survivability tool for anything above base steel path. You can't mod for health and armor, because the enemy damage values FAR exceed what you can achieve, so if you have 50hp or 5000hp makes literally no difference at all when approaching around enemy lvl 1500 and that is based upon SINGLE hits, not accounting for multiple hits. For the very same reason, shield stacking is beyond useless, even if they would buff the shield DR from 25% or 50% to 75% or more. It's all the same, when the enemy bullet damage exceeds hundreds of thousands of damage compared to your measly 1-2k shield/health you could cobble up by sacrificing all your warframe slots for those values. And this is what this boils down to: Nothing will change at all in the meta, because there are literally no options other than shieldgating to play in those enemy level ranges/level cap. The bottomline is though, all frames with no shield gimmick (speaking hildryn, protea, condem etc.) are stripped by 1 whole warframe mod slot, which are already VERY tight on every frame, because they need to slot in the new mod to revert shield gating to it's current form. Now, before those andies roll in with their argument of "bla bla but only 0.1% of players play this content". That is still 0,1% of us that get royally screwed over for no reason at all. There is no compensation for the nerf, no alternate way to go around it, it's just straight up you lose one warframe mod slot across the board and they didn't even care to make the shield gate mode an exilus mod to soften the blow a little bit.

Mh, I can't relate to any of your points. I already LOVED the first gen incarnons. When I got my hands on them, I never looked back to any other gun. In a one dimensional AoE meta at that time, it felt so good to me, to have weapons being able to be customized a step further than mods and have a skill rewarding gameplay loop in charging and using the incarnon. To me the normal version never felt like a pure charging device. There sure was and sure still is tactical advantages and disadvantages in holding your transformation. It really is that connected loop of the normal version and the incarnon working in tandem, which makes "Why would you want to use this when this other part is like, x5 more effective?" a statement, that I can't really fit into my view on the incarnon guns. For example, both Laetum and Lex Prime shred harder than most other secondaries in their normal form and are obscenely fun to use. NOW granted. The second generation incarnons have wild balancing and bug issues. There are those outliers that are playing leagues above the others. The Incarnon trees also have one less perk total, which is just a sign of lazy dev work. Clearly they put more work and thought into the first generation, which are much more customizable. The fact that for every weapon of the 2nd generation there is literally only a SINGLE viable path highlights how the devs worked here. They just had one balancing in mind and then put random stuff into the other choices, just so they don't need to compete with each other. It really didn't help to introduce 30 of them at the same time, obviously.