I think part of the problem stems from Shadowrun’s present day design team trying to serve two masters simultaneously... and as a result, failing each of them.
On the one hand, Shadowrun’s current designers want to stay as true to earlier editions as they can. After thirty years, the game’s universe has become a fully fleshed out reality of its own and they want to respect that. But the earliest days of Shadowrun were based not on “the future” but on what people in the Seventies and Eighties thought “the future” would be. Remember, in William Gibson’s Neuromancer — which is an obvious inspiration for Shadowrun’s first and second editions — there are no cellphones, there are no drones, and “three megabytes of hot RAM” is a valuable black market commodity. In the Eighties’ vision of the future, cybernetic limbs are slow, ponderous, and bulky... Unless you spend amounts of money on them that would make a megacorp blush.
This vision of the future gave us Robocop.
On the other hand, Shadowrun’s later design teams want to move the universe’s timeline forward and show technological change. Which is great, because it allows them to show the vision of the future as seen from the 1990s and 2000s... This is a vision of the future that takes inspiration from the present. It’s a future with ubiquitous cellphones, internet connectivity built into everything, wireless networks, drones, and augmented reality. Cybernetics in this version of the future are sleek, sexy, and if “obvious” then they look like something from an Apple Store. If “synthetic” then they look like Tricia Helfer...
This is the future that gave us Ghost in the Shell.
Shadowrun 6th Edition is trying to do both of these at once: Murphy and Motoko. As a result, it fails to do either one well.