Zoolooman, your post has lots of assumptions. The goal of course is for all weapons to be viable options. Yeah, the 3 armor-specific weapons are considered special, but it shouldn't be assumed that everyone will always want to take their armor-specific weapon. If that were the case we'd build them into the armors (an option which we've considered, btw). Same with the spinfusor.
We started and have stuck with our own assumption, namely that we can balance the weapons such that they're all viable options. If this proves impossible we can revisit our decisions.
You also seem to assume that more combinations are better.
A subtlety that isn't clear from the maths, and which I tried to explain in the other thread, is that the smaller the combination size, the more unique your equipment choice will be. If each person could only carry 1 weapon, for example, then everyone suddenly becomes extremely unique on the field. You'd have your mortar guy, your chaingun guy, your disc guy, etc. There'd be a standalone role for each weapon. At the opposite extreme, if each person could carry all weapons, then uniqueness would be eliminated because everybody's weapon choice becomes exactly the same. In other words, with each combination choice that you add, the roles on the field increasingly overlap, thus making each person less unique.
Extreme class-based uniqueness is not what Tribes is about...I agree completely. But there's still something attractive about uniqueness. You can imagine how a certain amount of uniqueness breeds teamplay. Uniqueness encourages inter-role dependencies (an example of inter-role dependencies is the clearer/capper/escorter relationship). You work with other people in order to maximize your team's effectiveness. In sports there is a lot of uniqueness due to individual skill, intelligence and each player's raw physical body. In online games we lack a raw physical body so it's nice to inject a bit more uniquess in other ways.
So while Tribes is and always will be about choosing your role and choosing your equipment, the goal is to make that choice meaningful from a teamplay perspective. And let's face it, at least 56 possible weapon combinations (which is what you get with a 3-3-3 system assuming 8 weapons, which also might not be a valid assumption) is still a lot of choice.
We'll see how it goes, right? I think some of you are a bit too fatalistic about something that is relatively easy to change in the event of extremely negative feedback,
KP
P.S. Please fix the a.s.s filter.