This brings us back to the Lightning Fryer and Corn Shotgun example. Corn Shotgun can easily be called overpowered in comparison with Lightning Fryer. But even despite that, Corn Shotgun is still less popular.
I will say this again, because it seems that not everyone undestands. Popularity is not a measure of effectiveness and it will never be. Such system will never work because of that simple reason. This is not a coincidence that such simple solution is NEVER used in video games.
So the question is: what do we really want? To have all weapons that are equally popular, or to have all weapons balanced and worth taking? We can’t have both.
Popularity-based damage increase may help with the first, but there is no way that it could balance the weapons.