I remember almost all of the secondaries being pretty disappointing in the original FreeSpace. Oddly enough, my favorite weapon to use the was the Synaptic. For whatever reason, it always seemed to actually work like it should have. I was originally pretty mad when I bought FS2 because the successor to the Synaptic sucked. When BP: WiH gave us the Slammer, but that's another topic.
This is kind of an interesting argument. I might even venture to say that aspect-seekers were mostly broken in FS1. If the Port fixes them, is it a bad move for being unfaithful, or is it a good thing for providing the functionality that should have been there? Hell if I know, but I prefer having several functional secondaries to choose from.