Perhaps the better comparison for a decker wouldn't be their deck vs. a gun but rather the samurai's 'ware, or the (Priority) cost for an adept/magician's Magic or a technomancer's Resonance.
No, sorry, it really is not. When you evaluate it based on how PCs are actually built, the direct comparison is to their firearms, not their augmentation choices.
In SR, a pretty fundamental assumption of the system is that, in general, anyone can do anything (With magic and resonance skills being the big exception) using low cost equipment and their skill total. Anyone can fire a gun, or remote control a drone, or talk. Your main investment to be able to attempt the roll at all is skill points. You don't NEED 60k of tailored pheromones to make a remotely difficult face roll, or muscle toner and wired to shoot a gun. You can just do that with a few skill points.
In SR, your 'ware and big nuyen investments, or your power points, go towards ENHANCING a skill towards superhuman levels of ability. A samurai COULD just buy a gun, but then they wouldn't be a samurai. They augment their skill pools by spending essence and extreme amounts of nuyen to augment their combat capabilities well above what can be obtained with skill alone.
Decking... doesn't work this way. And its in theory ok to break with that if you were to make decking a power source more akin to magic (That is, after all, what happened with Killcode. Decking was noted to have a minimum buy in on par with being a mage, so deckers were essentially given defensive oriented buffs and debuffs as 'spells') but breaking with the convention of 'cheap access that anyone can splash into, but expensive buy ins for superhuman ability' needs to be done mindfully.
Deckers basically can't function without the cyberjack and cyberdeck, which means they FUNCTION as the gun, but they are PRICED as the 'ware. Which is a problem because deckers also have 'ware that functions as 'ware they want to buy! Their attribute augmentation is literally the most expensive in the game!
And, despite the fact that 6e's matrix is better than 5e's, it still is a very limited domain of ability. You can DO stuff with it, but it clearly isn't more versatile than being a sam-face which costs less, there are many many scenes where this power source is essentially worthless or extremely minor support value, which isn't the case for the other power sources/roles in the game.
And this kinda makes sense because there is a design intent to force deckers to do meat things and not play a side game and interact with the same world everyone else is. And that is a fine goal, I don't agree with it, but its not inherently bad, you COULD execute on it well by making decking on par with being a face: Super cheap to do skill and 'ware wise so you sorta expect deckers to hybridize in the same way faces do so they always can have something to do even if decking won't be relevant in a given scene or very useful all run.
But instead it is the most expensive role to be, with the most limited set of utility (it is basically entirely dead in combat, which even a pure face isn't because they can at LEAST leadership, and Pure faces are extremely inefficient due to faces hybridizing almost by default!) and GM advice literally saying "Hey sometimes just tell the decker they HAVE to do non-decking things by shutting their power source off with wifi inhibitting wallpaper or whatever!" That is essentially what forced the 5e decker into being a non-role, so we can expect it to still be a non-role. Who is going to want to be the decker when it was designed to basically not be fun and also be insanely greedy as a role?
Either Killcode style 'spell hacking' actions need to come back REALLY fast to justify an entire PC being dedicated to google searches contacts can do for you and flicking lightswitches and cameras that the samurai could probably sneak past anyway, or they should honestly just remove a 0 from the cyberjack and cyberdeck prices (and possibly cut the essence costs of cyberjacks in half!) and say essentially "Deckers are like faces now and are an extremely low buy in role that you should hybridize with samurai or rigger so you have combat capabilities."
I'm not a dev, but if I had to speculate I would imagine that there was a desire not to have decking be an easy "add on" that could be tacked onto another archetype. Since skills have been simplified, picking up some ranks of Cracking and Electronics is relatively easy compared to previous editions. Given that, perhaps they decided to change the cost of entry to being a decker to the nuyen (and Essence!) of a cyberjack.
That is probably the case, because that is literally what 5e did to kill 'side deckers' being rampant in 4e. But side deckers in 4e mostly came from the matrix having infinite utility and agents existing. Neither of those are true in 6e. 6e probably could support 'side deckers' as well as side faces, in the sense that it probably is the most healthy way for the role to continue to exist as the game tries to escape the legacy of 'pizza time' deckers. It is essentially a utility/support role that grants access to information and locations without really pushing run objectives super hard or having combat capabilities, exactly like faces.
You can become a face with a few ranks of Influence and Con, but that is totally fine because it is expected for faces to bring more to the table due to the fact you can't really use influence and con in every situation like you can stealth, althetics, and a combat skill, or magical skills, or rigging skills. Deckers are in kinda the same boat, but instead of being a super cheap role in recognition of the fact Decker probably should always be hyphenated with Decker-face, Decker-mage, Decker-rigger, or decker-samurai, decker is probably the only role you CAN'T hyphenate, despite needing it the most.
