Honestly, having to buy and constantly read so many books just to build a character is kind of annoying. I have to check my books all the time for rules, gear, etc, it's exhausting. My opinion on the books though:
Run & Gun: Martial arts are neat but it's too hard to remember all of them, especially as the GM. All the special attacks are too hard to remember, and there is too many. The weapons are well done and I like them, but the armor is mostly redundtant stuff and encourages power gaming. The forearmguards, vitals kit, etc kind of upped the soak dice too far and caused more harm than good. I really dislike them.
Street Grimoire:One of the better books imo. Lots of nice spells and options.
Run Faster: Great book with a lot of options, most of which you will probably never play but it's a very nice resource. The qualities are reallly good and very needed as the core book doesn't offer that many.
Chrome Flesh: I was disappointed by this book. It has a lot of cool stuff but most of it I've seen in previous editions and not much of the new stuff jumped out at me. I was really hoping for more strong combat ware but most of it was just weird or not that good imo. Genetic infusions are really cool though.
Data Trails: Some great concepts but the matrix is just painfully slow and this makes it even slower. I didn't really enjoy the book much but it was okay.
Rigger 5: Don't have it yet.
Overall: I find it to be kind of annoying that each new edition forces the customers to buy a bunch of books or they can't play the archetypes they want. Spreading all that information over so many books is not practical imo. It also feels a bit like a cash grab when each new edition just recycles all the old stuff and you have to read it over again under the new rules, it feels like all the same stuff. There is sometimes a few new goodies but I haven't been too impressed. The rules of the game are long winded and spread out over too many books, the result is that 95% of the player base barely knows the rules, it's a huge problem. Anarchy should solve a lot of these issues, I won't have any reason to play core again. I'll be buying anarchy and anarchy related products (if they ever decide to make them). I may convert some stuff into anarchy as well. Another issue I have is that there is tons of useless stuff in the books that is basically just filler, like 5 ways to acquire each thing you want (such as low light vision). Many things are barely ever used and and feel completely useless because they are such niche items, in particular I'm talking about ware.
This all may sound very harsh, and it is, but I play Shadowrun because I love the setting and the types of things I get to do in the game. I think the rules are really outdated and bad, unnecessarily complex, and impossible to learn for most people. I know that certain players love having to "master" the rules, but I don't get anything out of it, not even a little bit. I've been playing for 20 years and all my friends and I agree that there are way too many pointless rules. The gameplay can often be very slow, especially when players feel compelled to check the book for rules mid session.
I am very hopefully that 6th edition will have a completely different feel. In particular I'd like to have all the rules and options in 2 or 3 books and simply cut down on all the flavorful discussions and writeups. I do love the writing, and the writers, but once I've read these sections once I don't ready them again, and I find they just get in the way of my attempt to find the particular item, spell, quality, etc that I'm looking for. I would much rather get writeups in other books and keep the two mostly separated. This is why I love books like Attitude and 6th World Almanac.They are very focused from cover to cover. If you look at the 3 core D&D books, there is a very heavy focus on the meat of the system and not that much writing about random stories, such as yet another writeup on mafia activity and other things that are written about over and over. When I open those books, I can easily find what I'm looking for and I have a reason to read the entire books again and again, because it's all useful and it is focused on a certain topic. That is the proper way to layout a book imo. Keep the rules and options in some books and the others can expand on the setting more.
Anyway, kind of a rant but that's how I feel. The writing is excellent, the writers work hard and I love them, but I really wish the product line was designed much differently.