I agree with the feeling that each weapon discovery is just a dmg upgrade. It would be nice to change properties or even to just not upgrade a weapon type. For indeed a laser shotgun does not seem to make much sense.
I ve made almost exact same post, ages ago.
Laser shotgun bugs me really strong, needs to be deleted. Another alternative for lasers can be : a pistol which turned into a strong flash light - it makes very low thermal dmg about 10, it is very easy to hit about 100%, range is capped (no dmg or efffect after max range) , but suppress opponent.
Yeah, it kinda bothered me that the only real difference was damage - I kept expecting based on the description that there would be accuracy increases or range changes, but sniping with a laser doesn't feel much different from a bullet.