Vision enhancement and audio enhancement are more likely to be bought in glasses/contacts/goggles/whatever or stuck in cybereyes. In the first case, there's no essence cost and in in the second, they're really just 'a little extra'.
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The biggest problem here though is your stating your claim as fact. It, plain and simple, isn't. All your claim is is your opinion.
Vision and Hearing enhancement can cost capacity instead of essence, but capacity costs essence (and money) so it's just a tradeoff and definitely not free.
I'm just making an argument and backing it up by evidence, but if you want to ignore my points, get belligerent and set up a strawman to annihilate it, then by all means, go ahead. No skin off my back.
I suppose it might matter a bit whether you think your GM will be evil about CFD? IIRC, in Lockdown gene mods gave a penalty on resisting CFD. Granted, we played through Lockdown before having Chrome Flesh, so we had never seen gene mods (nor nano-hives), so I wasn’t paying much attention to that part at the time, so I could be mis-remembering …. But to me a lot of the gene tech in CF seemed pretty cheap, and part of me wondered if the authors set that aggressively to make it appealing despite the CFD risk?
That's an interesting point. I don't have Lockdown, but a lot of the genemods seems to be a pretty great cost/benefit tradeoff. I assumed it was just standard power creep, but there might be some of that danger-factor added in.
