my biggest issue was the bullet sponging and totally unbalanced combat, youd either be a god that couldnt die or someone who has to land 50 headshots with a sniper rifle to kill someone
Well, your biggest issue is easily fixed by adjusting the difficulty...
I started playing again for 2.0 on hard, and most enemies went down with a single sniper headshot. The ones who didnt were the ones where they had a split health bar, so it was easy to tell if it would.
enemies routinely could take entire mags of sniper shots if rheyre levels above you / would dke to a pistol to fhe foot if they werr levels below you. youre either god or a balloon and it breaks combat. enemies with infinite hp isnt 'challenging' the way you want it to be, it's 'challenging' like a a 1000 question 12 times tables test