I personally don't care if they do it for officer gear, but would make sense actually.

You make a terrible comparison anyway. One anti-infantry weapon vs another anti-infantry weapon is not analogous to AV against tank. AV vs tank is more like offense vs defense, where the offense is designed to destroy the defense; making the lack of meta level symmetry even more of a balance problem. A better analogy would be to compare shield extenders vs scrambler rifles (which does high shield damage).
Would you want prototype scrambler rifles available when only standard shield extenders available.

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