The archetypes have always ranged from atrocious to playable (if far from optimized), and are often riddled with errors. But they do offer a look into what the writers envision as a viable cross-section of shadowrunners.
Whether that holds true in play is another thing altogether, and is largely dependent on how the GM runs the game, and what kinds of characters the other players like to play. Unaugmentated mundanes can at least be decent, though. Get Agility: 6, Reaction: 5, and Intuition: 5, with two or three combat skills at 6 plus specialization, and you will be rolling 14 dice to attack and 10 dice for passively dodging. Sure, the adept or the sammie can do it better, but it's not bad, and you have high Edge and a good mix of other skills, too.
I think unaugmented mundanes often get a bad rap because the people who gravitate them envision them as either Jacks of all trades or new to the shadows, resulting in low/average skills that are spread too thin; and they tend to have Attributes in the 3-4 range because they don't like having any low Attributes. 14 dice for attacks is decent; dice pools in the 5-8 range are barely breaking even with the stats they give for "mouthbreathing thugs".
