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Notes -
Yeah, these are competitive shooting divisions.
But then that's the thing- the reason they're like that is that sure, you can get an advantage by buying the meta gun, but you can't strap a bunch of other bullshit that doesn't fit in the general spirit of the category and then claim it's balanced (yeah, I'm sure that high-end 2011 with a comp and a dot identifies as a stock Glock 17).
I guess the difference is that even if I had a 2011 I don't want to compete against people running stock Glock 17s, because it's not really even a measure of skill at that point, it's also a question of how hard you can game the gun itself (because in that division, if you're the first guy to come up with putting a red dot on your handgun you deserve the win you're going to get by doing so because that's what that division is for).
It's poor sportsmanship to be intentionally trying to break the categories, which is the reason the entirety of the men's division isn't doing this even though at the end of the day they're passing up another chance to win. And once you lose that concept you don't have a game any more.
I feel like the solution is usually to have a bunch of categories/divisions (see Le Mans racing and 2-Gun shooting), though maybe this doesn't work so well when it comes to humans vs. machines.
If you don't have the ability or the willingness to give poor sports the boot it's not going to work regardless.
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