I never said overheating was a problem. If it heats up slower you can shoot longer and kill more people. Your the one who dosent fully understand the HMG.

The current state of HMG is very dubious. From the perspective of New Eden lore, HMG - a Minmatar weapon with high RoF and short range is actually right as it should be (it's very similar in concept to EVE's Minmatar autocannons). However, the fact remains that SMG is disturbingly close to CQC performance to HMG (although I wouldn't go that far as to say SMG is better than HMG).

If you increase HMG's range, you create two problems.
First (less important) is that it would lose it's New Eden lore consistency.
Second is that by buffing it's range you'll end up with role overlaps once other heavy weapons are introduced (Amarr heavy laser primarily).
IMHO HMG should remain being a close range weapon, although it should have the longest range of all other short range weapons. It should also be the most potent one in terms of killing potential (it is a heavy weapon after all). Whether this is accomplished by increased DPS, or by better damage application is purely a matter of fine-tuning and flavor.

The alternative to all of this would be to make HMG a "placeholder" weapon, until other heavy weapon variants are introduced. Sort of heavy AR, jack-of-all-trades type of weapon. For the time being, of course.

I'm not sure why people keep forgetting this: the HMG is currently mechanically broken. As, it's effectively bugged. I don't think think problems with HMG are it's design, it's really just the one glitch. Currently, the HMG doesn't actually use all of it's bullets, it only uses ~65%, the rest simply aren't counted as bullets. So in order to damage someone, you need to keep that tiny dot in the center of the reticle on target at all times. So that right there pretty much defeats the idea behind the HMG.

It's supposed to fire a cone of bullets, and damage anyone inside that cone area. But instead of being the ultimate spray-and-pray weapon, this bug ironically makes it a gun requiring constant precision. So when people talk about reducing the dispersion, I don't actually think that's necessary. Just fix the bug and make all of that dispersion actually count. So then you can fire very effectively against groups of targets coming in narrow areas, actually fulfilling that point defense role. And people trying to hop and dance around your stream of bullets will always be talking at least some damage as long as you can keep some part of your circle on them.

Of course, maybe even after fixing this, the HMG would still be a little lacking. Regardless, I definitely think fixing the bug is the best place to start.