Madmax, I'm a bit confused by something: You refer to Dancingrage and me as gatekeepers and say that we "worked so hard to nerf weapon MPs". Huh? Where on earth are you getting this from? As it happens, you're mistaken on that - neither Dancingrage nor I have censored feedback from weapon MPs or failed to pass on their ideas and/or concerns to the devs - but I really would like to know why you've formed the opinion that you have. Has anything I've said indicate that I'm trying to get weapon using MPs nerfed?
I think perhaps you over-estimate the influence professionals have. All we can do is pass on ideas and concerns - we can't control what the developers ultimately do. For the record, I'm not happy with our PvM debuffs, the difficulty pistol MPs will have reaching the nano-reqs for the top pet or weapon MPs' (particularly pistol MPs') lack of AR. I wanted Sacrificial Shielding modified rather than scrapped as well. Also didn't like SoZ getting functionally deleted. But I'm not a developer, and ultimately they choose what directions to take each profession.
I'm still hoping we can get more Pistol support somewhere however, possibly in itemization. We'll see, and I'll keep trying - though I (and this is just my guess, based on publicly available info - hopefully a wrong guess) wouldn't bet heavily that we will.