No, massey has the right approach . . . the paired SRM2s on a cavalry unit makes sense since it was the only sized launcher that could carry infernos at the time and they were the easiest kill on vehicles- since fire support vehs are a special target for the mech cav, again it makes sense. It also makes sense since Infernoes provided a set amount of heat (60% of what the average mech could cool) rather than spiking it up for a single turn to a higher artificial cap (especially when fiction has them affecting a unit over what would be multiple turns). If I could hit a vehicle with 50% of the 4 Inferno SRMs, that is 6 turns total the vehicle has to survive on a 8+ roll.
Its akin to saying the Dreadnaught as a design sucks because it cannot stand up to a US CVN- both ships were designed under different rules.
Your analogy isn't a valid one. There really isn't a real-world scenario which would work, because "rules" don't retroactively change the past like they do in BattleTech. If the SRM-4 and -6 suddenly have infernos available, that means they always had them available, unless there's a hard date before which that never occurred. Unlike the
Dreadnought, which was created to stand up to the guns of its day and eventually became obsolete. If aircraft carriers and torpedo-equipped fighters somehow retroactively existed during WWI, you'd have to assume the
Dreadnought class would have been created knowing that it would face these anachronisms and been adjusted during the design phase to accommodate. It was obsolete because these things didn't exist at the time and could not counter them once they did.
The SRM-4 and -6 suddenly having inferno rounds available should have been cause for a retcon to fix the design, since the entirely philosophy was different under which it was made. Hence why the MAD-3R sucks as a unit; it USED to have "crit padding" from the heat sinks under Battledroids rules. Now that it doesn't, it's a walking bomb. That design decision 'made sense' under the original rules, but once those crits "disappeared", would SOMEONE not have noticed that they kept blowing up? Well, the MAD-1R fixed this oversight by relocating the ammo to the same torso as the AC/5 in its record sheet. The MAD-3R should have had the same done for it.