I think it's incredibly stupid when people just do left-right-left-right strafing, as it basically guarantees that the other person cannot hit them. Even when I'm moving my aim left and right, they always seem to cross my stream of bullets nearly unaffected. I've tried this myself a few times and noticed that I take considerably less damage too. I just don't do this because it's so damn counter-intuitive. When someone's shooting at you IRL, that last thing you'd want to do is do the left-right-left-right dance, because it doesn't work IRL.

What makes this tactic in Dust ridiculous is the fact that you can change your direction instantaneously which immensely throws off the aim of the other person. Try this IRL. You can't because there's acceleration involved: you slow down, stop, and then speed back up in the other direction. There's this thing called inertia which prevents instantaneous change, and the amount of acceleration required is too great to achieve near instantaneous change.

I suggest that all movement in Dust has an acceleration factor to prevent instantaneous directional changes. This will make it much better and also more intuitive, and not whoever can mash left-right wins.

Edit: some further info:

Each suit should have its own acceleration constant, that way lights, mediums, and heavies all take the same amount of time to come to complete stops, change direction, etc. Let's say, for example, a heavy suit has an acceleration constant of 4 m/s per second. If it's walking/running at 4m/s, it would take it 1 second to come to a complete stop and another second to reverse direction. A scout would then have an acceleration constant of 8m/s per second so that it takes the same amount of time.

Armor plates should impose their speed penalties onto acceleration constants as well.

These numbers are just made up, and I feel like it would feel rather sluggish and unresponsive to have a 1 second stop time. I think some playtesting (which the Devs can perform) will yield the optimal acceleration constants.