BAR ratings should be done away with entirely. Why wouldn't all 'Mechs use BAR 9 armor on their heads? If you have only 5 armor on a rear torso, why not use BAR 5? The barrier rating gets you nothing that armor factor doesn't. Five points of armor are going to be half as thick as ten points over that same area.
A Battletech auto-rifle has as much in common performance-wise with an M4 as said M4 has with an Atl-Atl.
Good rule of thumb: If you have Battletech game stats for something, then comparing that something to anything built in the 20th/21st centuries is worse than useless.
Auto-Rifles are explicitly 20th to 22nd century tech. Bolt-action rifles, which can also damage 'Mech armor, are explicitly 19th century tech. You can quibble where a given brand name weapon falls on that spectrum, if you like, but the weapon stats are meant to be generically true across the whole of their respective technological spectrums. Or to put it another way: a 31st century auto-rifle is evidently
defined as a rifle whose build and performance is undifferentiated from a 20th century auto-rifle.
I'm not disagreeing with the other half of your argument, though. I agree that 21st century armor may not be a great analog for 26th century miracle armor.
at what point did some of you forget that this is a game and not a simulation? I can understand a desire for internal consistency, but in reality, would you prefer a paradigm where infantry are absolutely useless except against other infantry? It's a game, abstraction is necessary to keep everything balanced and playable.
Most of the discussion revolves around the rules not being abstract enough, or abstracted in unrealistic and counter-productive ways; that the current infantry rules are not well balanced; and that other directions might better improve playability. Improving similitude isn't automatically counter to improving gameplay.
