Um. The Sniper Rifle has never been nerfed. The only "bad" thing to ever happen to it was when the Charged Sniper Rifle got moved to the Prototype tier.
If anything, the one thing stopping them from being as good as they can be is the Redline. CCP won't buff them because they are perfectly safe in the Redline, and all of their complaints are completely worthless because of it.

Here are my thoughts:

Poor hit detection/blue shield flashes is terrible and should have been fixed... years ago. It's pretty disgusting that we have these problems even after over a year of dealing with them.

Sniper rifle stopping power is quite meh. On the other hand, it gives a great deal of safety and is quite easy to use - although scope sway is present on the initial zoom, the point and click it turns into from such a long range isn't very skill intensive. More so to land a headshot, but still not massively so.
The low risk part is exacerbated by the redline sniping that goes on. I'm sure there are some snipers who don't lurk deep in the redline, but a great deal of them do - and I'm very much opposed to giving them much of a power increase without increasing the risk.

I like the idea of increasing the headshot multiplier rather than the body shot multiplier. It appeals it encourages taking a more difficult shot for a higher reward, which should be possible rather than being stuck with that 'meh' damage output. But only if it really is that much more difficult - although proto logis whining about being not being unkillable, it's pretty stupid to have them easily OHKOable from the redline.

They need more zoom. Preferably variable zoom.

Add a marksman variant that does 0 body damage and ohk on headshots. 1 bullet, bolt action, cycle the bolt and out another bullet in.