No it's not. 'That's weird, rename would have been better' is fair. Making a mountain out of a molehill is anything but.
It isn't a mountain out of a molehill. Good conveyance and themeing is critical for making games cohesive and good. It is why games use shorthand based on your understanding of reality: "Of course my castles can't move, even though they have really high attack and defense stats" is helpful information that helps you learn rules faster and retain them. Games are complex and utilizing these tricks to help make information not just easy to remember but easy to instantly re-learn the second you hear the context is critical for speeding up table play. A big problem with say... 4e D&D or Anima wasn't their mechanics but the fact the mechanics sometimes had confusing concepts behind them (What is the difference between pushing, sliding, and moving, for example? Especially when you can 'push' someone CLOSER to you?) that made it harder to instantly recognize what the mechanics do. This isn't a trivial part of game design, WotC's MTG team basically spends half their time thinking about mechanical conveyance and it helps make one of the most complex TCGs to exist feel casual and accessible ("Of course that flying bird can fly over your non-flying creatures" sorta deal). WHFRP 3e basically 100% failed based on this problem despite the dice system it used becoming very popular for FFG's other games. This stuff
matters.It isn't that this choice will RUIN 6e 5EVAHHH but a huge selling point of 6e was that it would be easier to understand while still feeling authentic and crunchy to the SR experience. This (and preformance being in con with the con skill named con) feels like a pretty clear failure, it is confusing and it definitely will make things harder to keep track of. "How good am I at shooting rifles? Well its a firearm so my firearm skill will tell me" is easy mental shorthand. "What do I do to play music well to get these guys on my side? Is it ettiquette, negotiaton? ...Con? Ok..." is definitely going to be a recurring issue. It is sloppy, and its totally legit to call it out as sloppy. Criticism about minor issues isn't automatically making a mountain out of a molehill. That is like... an important part of critical analysis; figuring out how the little details work and contribute to a design or artistic expression's ability to impact you in the way it wants to impact you.
Engineering should be the skill for "building and fixing stuff." I'd have put Gunnery into Firearms, the skill for "shooting stuff." But I doubt I'll care enough to house-rule it.
The intent almost certainly was to reduce the two 'remote, electronic aid' archetypes to only requiring 2 skills so that it is much easier for them to splash other skills. A big problem with 5e riggers was that they essentially replaced perception with EWAR, a firearms skill with gunnery, and then needed most of the samurai skill list anyway because of how things like vehicle stealth worked and how remotely picking locks or disabling security required lockpicking.
Merging gunnery with engineering does a few good things that makes it seem like an obviously good idea, ignoring the name. It means riggers now won't be outsourcing drone repair as a matter of course for a small fee and will always be capable of fixing their own stuff, which is good because it was thematically weird that engineering skills were so non-optimal in terms of cost to benefit, so now that you automatically get repair discounts with your gunnery skill you won't be leaning on contacts so hard. It also, obviously, reduces rigger skill crunch, which is good when riggers have such insane skill crunch. And it means anyone who splashes rigger for remote gunnery also will become able to tinker with their drones automatically, which, again, is thematically interesting. Sometimes *losing* the option to not be good at two different things at the same time is more interesting and leads to more interesting characters than subdividing skills super hard, because all that does is discourage anyone who would thematically use the sub-optimal divided out skill from existing. The fact that an optimal rigger would have no idea how their car worked because that was a wasted resource just wasn't interesting and was weird, and made it weird that you had to deliberately make your PC worse mechanically to make them more interesting.
