THAT is my single biggest problem with SR4. The gutting of riggers.
There are other issues like the dumbing down of the magic and making technomancers/otaku just mages in the matrix.
I personally see nothing wrong with that. A unified and consistent set of rules only makes it that much faster to be able to cast what dice you need and get with the roleplay and fun. There doesn't
need to be a fundamental difference between how mages and hackers function, is there?
Oh, they THINK they want new stuff, they may even have convinced themselves on a surface level that they do, but on average the bulk of your customer base wants exactly what they had before, with enough cosmetic changes to make it FEEL different.
I remind with:
"Given what we're charging students and schools, what improvements have been made in Flynn... er, I mean, Encom OS 12?"
"Yeah this year we put a "12" on the box."
It would be cool that in the mass chaos of what happened, a new conspiracy to reunite the old U.S., and this time they're successful.
While I think america shouldn't have split and that the creators went a little Balkanization crazy (looking at history over the span from 500BC to the present, there is a stronger tendency to consolidation in geopolitics and economics than breaking down). However, the balkanization has already happened. It's part of the setting, so its something that will have to be dealt with as a coming plot arc - and given that countries unifying would threaten the political power of megacorps, that's not likely. It would be interesting to see, because I'd have liked a little more conflict between the competing interests of nations and corps with the nations being more than transparent pawns, that's not what I think the foundation of Shadowrun is.
You might try out the last few Bond films, though. Completely different look and feel.
I don't really consider them Bond movies so much as a reskinned Jason Bourne. In Shadowrun terms, Bond was at his base a Face with a lot of other skills. The recent ones are more a Street Sam with a lot of other skills - it just doesn't quite seem to jive with the books or earlier movies. On their own they're not bad movies, but as part of the Bond franchise I think they're a little weak.
As for the thread topic...I guess there's really nothing more to say, we all know the answer, don't we?