A better approach would be to nerf every weapon a little and give fitting/damage/range/etc bonuses to each of the suit classes to their respective weapon class.

This will make so that each class can still use other weapons (bar heavy weapons) but they are more effective on the classes they're meant for.

For example: give scouts a fitting, damage, and range bonuse to side arms to make them almost as good as lights.

So what about snipers? Mobile scout/sniper game play has been rising in delta because the ability to find and destroy heavy camping snipers are more than possible with two lucky shots at most and never a mag of hits now.

So... Caldari Sniper Rifles on Opposing Faction'ed Minmatar?

I use scout and commando as my primary suits - heavy and assault as secondary.

I disagree - my mini commando I find a lot stronger in combat but solo its a lot more of a risk obviously. ill set uplinks and hack with my mini and now galltente scout and engage in combat if I am in an advantageous situation. if my link is down ill change out to either the assault or dren sentinel.

scouts big plus is that they suit solo play, if I am in a squad besides the start of the battle Ill run every suit but scout.

I understand your point, scouts have replaced HMG as the bane of my game (but it doesn't bother me as much because it takes skill to run scout)

But what about the shotgun?
No light weapon means no shotgun, the signature weapon for scouts.

Nope, because it is very unscrubby to snipe in a scout suit and also it is very unscrubby to flank with a tac AR in a scout suit. Nerf the cloak and nerf the slots then it will be fine.

I honestly would love it if we got rid of the whole light, heavy, side-arm designation system since it restricts the sandbox that is the fitting system.

Instead what I would like to see is a system of bonuses and penalties for using weapons that fit the theme of a given suit. I realize that this is a confusing statement so let me explain further with examples.

Lets take the HMG for our first example. The HMG is a weapon designed for heavies and as such they would get to use it with its current stats. Medium frames fitting HMGs would have a 20% fitting penalty (meaning the fitting costs of the HMG for both PG and CPU would be 120% of the standard numbers) and a -25% movement speed penalty applied to them. Light frames that choose to fit HMGs would have major penalties, a 50% fitting penalty and a 40% penalty to movement.

Light weapons would be normal to fit to medium frames, would incur CPU and PG penalties to Heavy frames (25% perhaps) and a handling penalty (+20% dispersion), and would incur lighter fitting penalties to light frames (15%) and a slight movement penalty (20%).

Side-arms that are fitted to medium frames would have the 20% fitting penalty and a weapon switching speed penalty. Heavy frames that fit side-arms would have a 40% fitting penalty and a larger weapon switching speed penalty.

Please note that under this system weapon slots would not be designated as heavy, medium, light but would just be open weapon slots.

Why take away lights from every frame except Minmatar? If anything, it should be Amarr that keep their Light Weapon Slot.

Anywho, I disagree with anything trying to make scouts slayers. Scouts ate supposed to be an information build that requires EWAR. Let's keep it that way.

Assaults with rifles are better slayers than scouts of they have racial gear and good spacial awareness, or at least are better at handling light weaponry than scouts are. The only scout that gets a weapon bonus is the Minmatar with the knife bonus.