I disagreed, with, like, every other point in your post, but I still wanted to like it a bunch because this is ultimately the crux of the issue and I couldn’t agree more.
I just feel like automatic balancing would not give us five different answers in that survey, but instead the same answer that changes every five weeks.
I feel like when the weapons are truly balanced, the one a player chooses should say less about the weapon and more about the player. If I pick Ion, it shouldn’t be because it’s better or worse than the other weapons - it should be because maybe I like to sit and spam bullets mindlessly, or maybe I like to fly supernova often, or maybe I just like the colour red.
As a personal example: Even though Utensil Poker is objectively still a bit better, I play Absolver currently because it’s viable enough to use and I prefer the style of it - charged, sniper-like blasts that require timing and planning while also playing as much of a defensive role as they do attacking. Eventually I hope all weapons reach that place of being “viable”.
And honestly, I’d like if we reached a place where to score optimally in a daily challenge, grabbing a gift box for the points was more important than what’s inside 90% of the time. But that might be asking too much 
I would be content for choosing a weapon to feel like, well, choosing, I suppose.
Yeah, maybe this. Utensil Poker was always the “secret weapon” from CI3 to me - and even if it’s not objectively better, it still ought to feel like the comically ultimate foil of anything that resembles a chicken.
Maybe a buff against chicken based enemies and a nerf against non-chickens, but that could be opening a massive can of worms.
While I won’t argue that coward’s don’t horrendously skew the weapon roster (I accidentally grabbed a boron the other day and it was a death sentence), I wouldn’t go so far as to say things are at all skewed toward Absolver at the moment. I play with it regularly - and though it can destroy literally ten armoured chickenauts at once, it really struggles with plenty of other things that most weapons would eat for breakfast and honestly feels within the realm of (what I at least would consider to be) balanced, where by comparison my other preferred weapon (photon swarm) does not at all.
In a game about killer chickens from space, is a little bit of RNG and chaos that bad of a thing? As long as you feel like you can overcome it.
Sometimes, simple ideas are the best. I’d like to see this too, aha