Making it a priority pick falls into the same trap that the current edition fell for: Price doesn't equal a role.
I would just reduce their price a lot, and the price of the cyberjack while we are at it. There is this weird philosophy that I think came about due to 4e's total annihilation of tech roles that you need to put a massive cost gate on the minimum equipment needed to do things to 'protect' the role, but in reality that issue came about not due to the low barrier of entry but the fact that tools existed that completely removed the utility of personally having skills in those fields: Agents, pilot programs, and autosofts.
Control rigs are essentially the rigger equivalent of muscle toner, with a few minor benefits (you get bonuses to stuns mainly. Some argue that it also gives hotsim initiative, but you don't need a control rig to get hotsim initiative piloting drones, it only gives a bonus doing so AND makes you take damage from being hit) but a lot of drawbacks (it is a LOT more expensive to get your drones and command consoles than... you know... a gun. Because drones ALSO need guns), and probably should be priced at that level, but instead they were shoved at a massive essence cost to help prevent people from just taking them to have them because they are worth their price.
Which, obviously, doesn't actually protect a role, it just makes the role bad, because the value of the 'ware in question is obviously not worth the price. Why take a control rig that costs massively more than the samurai's ware when the rig basically does the same thing the samurai does anyway?
Does that cost mean a hacker or any PC may take a rig cuz its REALLY worth it if vehicle combat is common? Probably. But it doesn't devalue the rigger role or mean it doesn't exist if hybridizing the role is possible. Most good roles in SR CAN be hybridized, and it indicates something is very wrong if the writers can't figure out a way to allow the role to be hybridized.
Like if a samurai takes tailored pheromones, one of the broadest skill boosting pieces of 'ware in the game, that is fine. A Face can take Toner and a reflex recorder to boot at 3 levels for less than a rig. But if someone takes a rig or a cyberdeck and hasn't built literally their entire PC around the concept, that apparently isn't ok, despite ALSO the fact that there is a perception these types of characters exclusively operating on the matrix is also bad. I don't see any problem with a samurai who likes driving to get a rating 2 control rig for 80k and .4 essence but apparently that just can't happen and it needs to be priced at 2 essence in order to ensure no one would ever take a control rig under any circumstances where they don't base their entire PC around it. And because basing your entire mundane PC around one thing in SR is like... objectively a bad thing, people just don't make people with control rigs, even if they want to use drones now. Drones themselves are extremely useful, control rigs are borderline worthless, which is why most optimized riggers in 5e don't have them despite obviously being riggers.
It really feels like we are just repeating mistakes at this point because no one sat down and thought "Ok. What should a role even be?" They are trying to force it via high buy ins but don't bother to make the high buy in worth anything. A 1 essence 100k cost per rating would make sense if a rating 3 control rig alone was enough to make your PC amazingly powerful, like 3 auto hits on defense tests and attack tests to make it the equivalent of 3 essence of samurai 'ware, or giving you an insane laundry list of utility functions like how 3 ess of 'ware would play in a face, but it doesn't. It, effectively, is just +3 to some skill rolls.
Nominally, hybridization without role erosion like 4e had is a good thing, it makes characters more distinct form each other, gives mundanes way more room to grow, and helps make the nominal advantage of being a mundane of versatility actually work. Also, it fits the lore better: SR historically had most experienced runners dabble in most aspects of the setting because it was a smart survival strategy: a lot of veteran samurai went out of their way to learn a few decking skills because they knew it would come in handy. That hasn't worked for 3 editions now, one because decking skills were worthless (4e) and two because it just isn't feasible to 'dabble' anymore. But like it used to be a half decent deck could run 50k, maybe 100k, which feels like a lot but this was also when priority A was a million nuyen and B was 400k so it was 100% possible to just get a deck and some programs and skills and have at it on your logic 4 samurai.
We went from low end decking options running you 1/20th of your resource budget to 1/4th, totally ignoring the fact that logic and intuition boosters were insanely critical for 5e's hacking meaning you really were looking at 100% of your resources to even get started. Despite the matrix being more useful overall due to wireless, this change pretty much single handedly has forced deckers to be a shadow of a role, because almost nothing in SR is worth 1/4th your resources to get the bare minimum level of access. Maybe if you were effectively casting spells (It isn't an accident only mages really work with this system) but not to flick lightswitches...
