All that's true StoneRhino, but we've also gotten better about special munitions like smoke rounds, and increased average unit speeds (and hence TMMs), and the use of ECM including stealth and null signature systems. The weapons have indeed gotten more lethal, but with an appropriate set of counters, it's possible to mitigate that higher risk and still effectively close with your assault units. The Ti T'sang and Thunderbolt60RLA are great examples of shock over fires. Do they need some ranged support to close? Yeah, probably. But they can close quickly, particularly for heavies, and can throw some wicked short range combat power when they get there.
The problem with that is they are extra tonnage which reduces your damage output. The same goes with larger engines, or the larger engines end up being XLs which reduces your ability to take as much of a beating as a standard engine mech. Also, unless your entire force is rushing, the ones that are trying to close to physical attack range are going to be facing a lot of the force the other side can put out on his own, not just the long range weapons that are now going to get short ranged shots, but also the medium and short ranged guns, anti-mech attacks from any battle armor in addition to mech physical attacks. ECM means nothing to a lot of weapons and smoke rounds within the ranks of the targets can be swing against you just as quickly as it swung in your favor.
Not sure about you, but we started using just about everything out of Maxtech back in what...1997? Nothing is really new in the core rules books today that wasn't around in some form back then. We all used most of the gear and I always tried to squeeze the most out of everything to piss the others off by pulling off something they weren't ready for. Even with all the extras in the game getting into physical attack range post 3050 is still significantly more risky then 3025 games. If the other guys are letting you pull physical attacks off for more then one round, and doing so in your games with some consistency, chances are the other guys just aren't doing things right.
At one point two of my friends were using walking bombs, basically stripped down light mechs packing XXL engines with heavy small lasers. Their goal was to rush up to pointblank range, fire off their heavy small lasers and self destruct their light mech. Those things had nasty target movement mods. Forget physical attacks, that crap was nasty! Then there were my favorite example against those that hate LAMS, which was clan LAMS(yes as wrong as it was for them) with TSM + the old school maces. Not just double the damage, but quadruple damage, IIRC. We got forced to work as hard as possible to stay the hell away from units that were rushing into physical attack range, heck, within blast radius of a walking bomb of a mech. I would have welcomed a hatchet wielding mech out of a TRO!
In the end it is possible to get into physical attack range, but the life expectancy should never be more then two rounds unless the controlling player commits to physical attacks late in the game when the bulk of his forces are not to far back. The problem I have seen with that is the longer the wait on those physical attacks, the less they impact the game. I'm not against them, heck I am trying to build a hatchet lance of minis just for the heck of it. Kind of similar to an AC20 carrying mech, its not always going to do damage, but when it does, its going to hurt like hell. If it doesn't, it also did its job by distracting the other player and soaking damage that would have otherwise been thrown at my other units instead.
The funny thing is that the most obnoxious hatchet mech I played against was the Cerebus, I think thats the name, the light mech with a hatchet. It was used against a light mech of mine, which is a sure way to get on my bad side. [tickedoff] hahahah... ;D