I’m sorry, no, I don’t find that to be true at all. They have considerably less guns overall in the older games, most of the guns the guards and 47 have in this trology are pretty distinct and do have differences in terms of stats, and easily dwarf the count of past games, even minus reskins.
So they’ve done what you wanted to, but not to your liking. They have done this. 7DS unlocked weapons and suits, featured contracts have a whole list of unlocks, and certain escalations and challenge packs do unlock suits and items. Adding more unique items, especially SMG rifles which aren’t that useful anyway, are a hard sell due to how much they’re not used in the overall gameplay meta, which IOI always has to consider when adding items for us to unlock.
As mentioned, loud weapons generally tend to not do well in games like this because, surprise, this is a stealth game. Even Sniper Rifles are problematic here due to the games’ balance of them being wonky. So I don’t think very much replay value would be added.
I like the 2-2 dark because it genuinely looks really cool and is useful in a stealth run, same with the Ruby Rude Sniper Rifle for similar, albeit more limited in scope, reasons. But there’s a reason I haven’t touched the Striker V3 or the AR255 SMG…because it just isn’t useful unless i’m going to go loud and HAM.