I think I've posted this before but just in case I haven't:

Anyone who considers themself a sniper first and footsoldier second is a fool.
HOWEVER, I believe it's been glaringly apparent that snipers are being nerfed in every way possible without actually reducing sniping spec stats. This may be a tertiary effect of the various updates and upgrades we've made in the game over-all but the bottom line is that it's less and less desirable to be a sniper because of the blatent, if not purposeful, disregard of sniper play style and mechanics.
I understand sniper hate but the fact is, those of you who harbor such feelings, you need to learn to deal with it. Snipers were literally invented to **** people off and break morale. You might as well cry about tanks having armor; you're NOT supposed to like it. You ARE supposed to HATE it and you ARE supposed to learn to deal with it.
There are obvious flaws in map design which can make snipers more of a pain (such as MCC sniping or "head-glitching") and those can be or have been dealt with. But putting the screws to a whole class because you don't like to get one-hit without warning is not sufficient reasoning and it's somewhat insulting.

I'm not a developer so I don't know the difficulties in balancing classes. But I believe I can still make some suggestions:
Make the sniper class much more costly to spec in to. I'd even be ok if it was EXTREMELY expensive to spec into, it's worth it to me. I didn't get this game so I could thoughtlessly pull a trigger. I would actually prefer to have to have sniping be a smaller subset of players in the game because it should be a real specialty. One way to do this might be to make sniping a luxury. It would discourage the casual sniper from specing into the skill tree too deep. When I say extremely expensive I mean like a 5-fold increase in SP per skill. This may upset some peoples sensabilities. But, besides the fact that you cry because you cant be a fully spec'ed sniper AND fully spec'ed whatever else, what argument could you have against making people who want to snipe woefully miserable because now they have to really choose to be a sniper, which takes time and dedication, or spend their points on being another drone.
The other possible way to deal with this would be to increase map size further and create multiple terrains. Enourmous maps could have multiple hills and valleys and plains and objectives that are far away from redlines. This would give us the opportunity to have an indoor installation with a lot of QCQ to maintain control and isolated objectives which practically necessitate a sniper to help maintain control. There are plenty of other advantages to larger maps and I sure some of you have good counterpoints (I can't think of any downsides honestly) but then I think we would need to increase draw distance so ACTUAL LONG RANGE sniping would be possible (400m is paltry considering sniping TODAY easily crosses 1000m - with records over 2000m). Then we could get into some bullet-lag and drop mechanics (siiiiiick)

Is it me, or do the new maps make sniping a little irrelevant? Most of the areas are corridors and inside of structures. I know some people quit mid game and just go snipe with militia gear but for those of us that spent some time building up their sniping I feel like the shift towards ground troops might make sniping non-existent.

A proto sniper and I agree with this, if you can't find a place to snipe you just aren't doing it right, learn to assault-snipe, that means getting your ass down from the hills and finding the notches to fire off a couple shots and move on

Yes. You are right about the position I mentioned above. But you take advantage of the height and view, you need to take the risk that you expose and be concentratedlly fired. I saw enough that people stay in a safe house and slaughter other people on the open ground with a sniper rifle. That is something I really don't want to happen again. Actually in dust you don't need to calculate distance and ballistics, which make sniper rifle easier to handle than other game. That 's really dangerous for anyone shows up on uncovered area. That's why you can see there are more covers in the map.

On the other hand, I don't think sniper is an easy role to play with. Sitting at safe hideout and firing out all your bullets will not help you practice your shooting skills. From my perspective, sniper should always change his location, keep running from one safe spot to the another without exposure. Once he fires, it needs to count and he needs to remain undetected. There is good example in our internal playtest - we have a person sitting on the top of killboard even if all combat happens in the research facility. He is really good at scout, and constantly hiding and shooting from different places.