In fact, Vulnerability itself only affects the Regeneration power, nothing else. Just because a normal metahuman has a severe allergy to Silver, it doesn't mean they're utterly screwed out of being awesome.
Vulnerability doesn't work the way you think it does. It adds a rather large DV increase to the damage of any attack using that weapon, in addition to disabling regeneration. Also, no one is seriously saying an allergy to silver makes you automatically bad, though people are correctly noting you are further reducing the total power level of shifters despite the fact that they are already very bad in order to maintain consistency with a previous edition over the integrity of the current one.
Dual-Natured is another thing shapeshifters have always had and never should have lost in the first place, and it has positive side effects as well as the negative everyone doesn't like.
Why? What part of being dual natured is integral to the shifter experience and lore? What would be so irreparably harmed by unsaddling them from that horrifically terrible quality to allow them to blend in and play up the duality between metahuman and animal more? What integral part of the lore is now ruined? Can you even name anything? Because it seems like arbitrary grognardism from the outside, a resistance to an edition update applied only in a very specific way for one specific type while leaving everything else, things that changed on a much more fundemental level, unchanged.
And more importantly, positive side effects? Really? Yes, you ignore the -2 to acting on both planes, but that is not at all an important benefit. The only real mechanical benefit being dual natured gives is that it allows you to assense slightly faster, but that doesn't even begin to overcome the many many negatives?
What's your problem with naga? The fact that the setting hasn't just glued arms to snakes like almost every other interpretation I've seen? It's definitely more interesting this way, if nothing else.
The mechanical price you pay to be one (The priority combined with being dual natured) is not worth the mechanical output. Basically you are ascribing cost to the cool factor of being a naga, which is bad design, it is like saying that pistols are cooler than assault rifles so you have to pay an extra 10 karma to learn them, even though despite being cooler than rifles they are mechanically worse.
Having fun or doing something interesting shouldn't have a 'cool tax' on it. This is true of most of the metasapients except for pixies, who are actually tit for tat better than metahumans at many aspects of the game, which is why Pixies have become somewhat of a meme among shadowrun playerbases.
The last thing I have to say, though? If you want to play something weird, you better be ready to deal with the consequences of being weird. Centaurs aren't going to be able to fit into normal vehicles. Naga don't have limbs to do a lot of work (which is why Awakened naga in their society are the upper crust; they can use magic to do things directly or just cast Magic Fingers to manipulate objects 'manually'). Sasquatch have no voice boxes. Shapeshifters aren't acclimated to society without paying the Karma cost for it. Various metavariants are rather outlandish in appearance. Be all the special snowflake you can be! While some people consider the phrase pejorative, it is just another way of expressing something being unique. Just be ready to accept the repercussions of such features.
No one is necessarily saying they want the weird variants to not have weird things about them. But what people are saying is that the mechanical cost of being a Shifter, Naga, Squatch, or Centaur is radically out of line with what they actually do. You pay a massive tax to do a weird concept, one that is so high Naga and Centaur essentially can't be played right now, and one that puts Shifters and Squatches deeply in the hole in terms of power to the point you are kind of being selfish and unkind to the fellow people at your table rolling them.
Furthermore there is agitation that there was an overfocus on restoring shifters to their old state rather than continuing the
welcome trend of changing things from previous editions that didn't work. Shifters lost regeneration and dual natured, but their entire fluff changed, now there were major urban shifter populations that literally can no longer exist. There are wannabie metahuman shifters who no longer work because dual natured makes such an act totally impossible So did Dryads, if you didn't notice. They now come about from any elf anywhere in the world rather than being part of this one specific weird cult on an island. A change specifically made because dryads were popular but their lore was problematic.
Karma became edge, which is possibly the most massive lore change shadowrun ever saw. Mages gained summoning, Shamans gained binding, Spell formulae no longer had to be purchased at a specific force, and all magical types became one archtype with no rationale and no one batted an eye because it made the mage experience smoother.
Wireless bonuses exist. RCCs are now required to operate drones. Agents can't run on comlinks. None of these things changed as a part of the matrix protocol update, they changed for mechanical reasons and mechanical reasons alone.
Things change between editions that are major unexplained lore changes all the time and it isn't the job of Errata to undo clear design intent to make things better by making them different. If you are serious about undoing edition updates to the lore, then we need to seriously talk about how all the currently printed traditions will be supported and who will get what spell list.
I'm not so big a fan of standardizing the power levels, personally. My only desire is to have them require an appropriate investment for what you receive. That way, if everyone is given the same amount of resources, the ones who don't pay for special things can invest in other upgrades to keep themselves on par.
That is literally the controversy, because none of the metasapients save pixies and some vampire variants actually offer that, and these changes are pushing the game away from that.
Oh, and thank you for reminding me that Changelings need fixing too. The fluff and the mechanics for the three types are wildly divergent, so that should be looked into.
Praise be to Firebringer this has been a long time coming!
