Weapon Design system to avoid unstable combat triangle and balancing issues

We are the engineers...therefore we engineer the weapons. A new manufacturing block, a weapon foundry i.e., for three things: upper receiver, lower receiver, and ammo == 'This' is the triangle for combat.

We decide the upper receiver (barrel length, size, caliber, number of, rotary, optics, etc) with the accompanying characteristics(range, stability, heat management, weight, mobility etc). Lower receiver (cyclic rate, magazine type, ammo number, mounting type, etc), and finally ammo (energy type, airburst, penetrating, indirect, direct, etc).

How a game about engineers, that has less ability to create your own weapons than a game like Call of Duty has, creates balancing problems. You the engineer decides the 'balance' by engineering new counters to the counters, to the counter-counters, and so forth. The current method, of Keen essentially doing all the weapon engineering (design) decisions, when they release a 'completed' weapon design, means that we as the player are unable to 'engineer' a counter to the employment of them...

Which leads to players trying to essentially 'unbalance' the gameplay to get a counter...which leads to Keen doing all the 'engineering' of a new/old weapon all over again for a new counter to fix the 'balance'...leading to players figuring out a new way to counter Keen's design decisions on a weapon by unbalancing the gameplay again...

Cutting us, the Engineer, out of the loop creates balance issues since we are relying on Keen to do all the weighing of a complete weapons design decisions and engineering thereof, when it should be...us... doing the design and weighing and evaluations.

We the players engineer will the balance. Keen needs to just give the weapon systems to us to engineer. That -is- the gameplay loop ;) Add in shields (energy/kinetic/thermal/gravity etc), armor types, and so on...