Weapons: Are there upgrades or only side-grades?
Solution 1:
Weapons that can be found on Pandora belongs to 11 different manufactures; by design, as described by Borderlands Wikia, each manufacturer favor different weapon attributes:
- Atlas - Above-average balanced attributes
- Dahl - High recoil reduction
- Eridians - Energy-based alien weapons, with no reload, only a recharge time (giving them infinite ammo)
- Hyperion - Highest accuracy, good recoil reduction, marginally increased damage
- Jakobs - Highest damage, low rate of fire, heavy recoil, non-elemental
- Maliwan - Elemental weapons, lower base damage
- S&S Munitions - Largest magazine capacity, slower reload speeds
- Tediore - Fastest reload speed, mediocre stats, regeneration
- Torgue - Balanced attributes, good damage, decreased accuracy and heavy recoil
- Vladof - Highest rates of fire, lower accuracy
- Gearbox - Special, most rare by far
This is the main reason because there is no perfect weapon. If you like balanced stats you should probably look for an Atlas weapon.
"Buy an Atlas, and you too will know what it is like to hold the power of the gods in your hands!" - quote by Markus Kinkaid
In conclusion, according to developers there are 17,750,000 different variations of weapons available, therefore luck is an attribute to be taken into account in "Diablo-style" games like Borderlands. And this is also the reason why many players like them a lot.
You should definitively invest 1 or 2 points into luck at your next (real-life) level up. :D
Solution 2:
I've played through it a few times now and most weapons have a balance, something really good, but some drawbacks as well. Otherwise a weapon would be particularly overpowered. You have skills that offset the drawbacks.
Personally, the 3 round sniper rifle thing annoys me too, but with the hunter talents, you can increase it to 6 (normal for most other sniper rifles). Faster reload skills, bullets doing extra damage, other talents (depending on class) can make up for the weapon shortcomings.
So through experience I would say that they always come with some drawbacks.