I think the biggest issues here has always been that the developers are trying to give the Deckers to much to do.
I disagree. I think the current problem is more they have this inertia from a system that has been tinkered and swapped around like a Jigsaw for 3 editions and itterate on it fixing complaints about said system but never actually nailed down what a decker's purpose is and what it is meant to do as a role.
"Decking, obviously" you might say, but that is a tautology, akin to saying 'Facing' for Faces. We know what Faces do as a role: They lie, mislead, and subvert social systems to gain access and weaken sites to other avenues of attack. It is super clear not just their thematics of being someone who talks, but what they can accomplish, how they can accomplish it, and why you would want to accomplish it. Their scope is limited (Faces can't do much when talking is off the table) but it is made up for by making Facecraft
really fraggin cheap to get good at so that Faces almost always are built with a secondary specialty so that they can throw down.
Samurai gain physical access, remove physical obstacles both living and mechanical (like locks) subtly and overtly. The limits and power of their role congeal into a sensical role to be: Samurai tend to be (despite what many people assume) the most subtle role due to physical methods not instantly setting off alerts like failed hacking rolls might, numinous perception and astral signatures not being an issue, and failled con or disguise rolls not getting you in a pickle. And they are extremely good and consistent: Stealth rolls are hard to fail in 4e, 5e, and 6e, gymnastics gives you amazing vertical movement, palming is really hard for most NPCs to ever detect, they generally can't die in combat, ect. But the limits of the role also make sense and keep it fun despite its upsides creating a cohesive fantasy: They are super amazing and subtle when they want to be... but they are the only role unable to 'project power;' They can't help someone in a different room, let alone a different building, unlike every other role (Even faces can leadership!). So playing a samurai creates a good gameplay loop where
you personally are rarely in trouble, but your main task of saving other people from trouble is harder for you than every other role because you need to physically be there to stop problems, which not only reintroduces tension where it is lost from you personally being bullet proof, and arguably being way more interesting.
Hackers, meanwhile, sorta... exist for the sake of it. Their abilities depending on edition sometimes affect non-abstract systems (like KC's introduction of defensive boosts) but generally a hacker's skills and abilities almost exist to hack 'for their own sake.' It isn't really exactly clear the ways hackers add value or could handle many problems solo (as every other role can generally be self sufficient in any scenario or are Faces and thus are also half samurai or half mages or whatever). Despite 4e, 5e, and 6e moving hacking out of Pizza Time and into the main gameplay loop, it still ultimately is a minigame that exists for its own sake (even in older editions, it was common for hacking sessions to purely exist to have an objective to hack, a sort of McGuffin mechanic if you will, and it wouldn't alter the structure of many runs to have hacking terminals be replaced by a physical object you had to fiddle with uninterrupted for 5 minutes).
There are some clear things a hacker might envision they should do based on lore, like looping cameras or jamming coms, but this historically is low value (Most roles are already so good at not caring about cameras due to stealth, invisibility, or disguise) and rather hard, making not worth the risk of detection as a result. Matrix Searches are neat, but are mostly a legwork action and aren't really that much of a value add on a Face asking friends for info. 5e was especially bad with this in that it actively took things out of the game that hackers could do, it was a massive system for subverting systems and infrastructure without telling you what any of it did or how it worked or why you would want to do that. As bloated and invasive as 4e's hacking was, at least it was REALLY clear what it could do for you (even if it was so overarching that it became sorta a mini-meta to use agent botnets to take over every device remotely related to a run and copy all your software onto it). We
still don't really know how people log into personas in SR5 (as in from a basic 'how do people do it in universe that every single person would know just as you know to log into your computer you type in a password, not technical details about persona security) despite that kinda... being an important thing very relevant to the plots of hackers who may want to impersonate people or steal access to systems or social media accounts (which... also don't exist in the SR5 matrix system...).
Worse, hackers are in many ways defined by their weaknesses more than what they do well. While weaknesses can make a role feel MORE fun (again, see Street Sams running about trying to protect their fragile children from sticking their fingers in electrical sockets or getting their heads beaten in by gangers or arrested while unconscious rigging) the weakness needs to hook into their strengths to create a clear entertaining challenge, rather than existing more to just limit what you can accomplish. This is why, for example, people hate Background Count: It doesn't really interact with anything interesting about mages or adepts, it just makes you worse in a dumb unfun way. Likewise, this is why people don't like the concept that mundanes are weak to magic, it is a broad weakness telling you to not have fun in magic focused scenes rather than giving you a problem to sink your teeth into.
Deckers have 3 major weaknesses that interact in a super toxic way, combining to be more than the sum of their parts. Firstly, despite having a similar issue of little utility to faces outside of their own subversion method, are deliberately designed to be an exclusionary role, in that it is an active design decision to make being a hacker really expensive in terms of gear, 'ware, essence, skills, and sometimes attributes. This means if your a hacker, it is hard (though not impossible) to supplement your skillset. Second, despite one of the core appeals of hacking being you remotely ruining someone's day, there is a perception that remote hacking is fundementally bad for the game because it innures the hacker from physical risk (see why Street Sams are fun for why this doesn't make sense as an argument for remote hacking being bad. Hackers COULD be a digital babysitter much like the street sam is a physical one, getting tension from trying to protect their super dumb children from alarms and target locks or whatever), resulting in systems being created to rob the hacker of the fantasy of being 'the guy in the van who is the invisible hand messing with the run'. Third, hacking is deliberately not made useful enough to replace more traditional combat skills. Faces and hackers are the only role without a 'one and done' offensive action baked into their kit, though faces do have leadership.
This means that hacking isn't good enough to be a sole skillset to depend on in situations it isn't designed for, you will be forced to do non-hacking things, and you won't be allowed to get tools to handle non-hacking things because you gotta blow 200k on a deck and 300k on some brain boosters and you need skills B to get your hacker base. So not only is what you accomplish an unfocused mess, but you are constantly just forced to do things you didn't decide to do and are actively dragged away from the 'promise' of the role. This is why hackers have been such an issue for so many editions, it isn't 'they have too much to do' because 'ware hacking was never good in 4e or 5e anyway. It is fundementally hard to say why you would ever want to be a hacker as opposed to anything else except in situations specifically designed to justify the hacker's existence.
Combat situation? Clear reason to want to be a mage, or an adept, or a street sam, rigger, or even face to some extent. Gotta get into a building to try to find some juicy blackmail material? Do you like the idea of being invisible or a ghost, sneaking in like a ninja, walking in through the front door after flashing your school ID like it was a health inspector badge, or maintaining an awesome network of tiny spy sensors that fly about? Every role in the game has clear utility in almost every situation EXCEPT the hacker.
The hacker sorta muddies through and generally does things more clumsily than any other role in order to ensure you wouldn't play a hacker over those roles. Combat situation? Get access to their gun over 1-2 passes and then spend an entire third pass to eject their mag an- oh they got shot... or combat is over before I got to use the mark...
This is part of the feedback I gave for KC, and its why hackers in KC got a bunch of actions that intended to codify what they did: They got tools to directly and instantly stop hostile information sharing, and became remote tricksters encouraged to make things really annoying for people. So now they went from this person who handles... things most people don't care about like files and datasteals that only exist to give the hacker an objective in the run... to this digital trickster protecting their team through more control oriented methods. No phonecalls for you, that bullet isn't going to hit, stop shooting so accurately, ect. And while this didn't solve the issues with hackers as a whole... (For example, there are MAJOR thematic issues with the idea that hackers mostly use off the shelf stock computers and that your wallet is a huge determiner if you can even start trying to learn to hack), it sorta made the role... work even if the GM wasn't bending over backward to invent reasons for hacking to be useful. Suddenly you got to be the hero who slapped the dice out of the GM's hand when they rolled something really scary for the rest of your team and shout 'NOT TODAY SCUMBAG' which is... really fun.
I think for hackers to ever be fixed someone needs to nail down not how they do the thing (Which is essentially what the matrix updates always are) but
what they do. Do they control information and mess with devices to support their team? Fine, focus on creating actions that make that useful. Do they need to be physically present? Fine, then find ways to make hackers have actions that make them feel powerful for being somewhere, like giving out awesome target locks or creating Trideo Illusions. Can they be remote? Then focus on them as someone managing something constantly for the team (such as having tech based threats, again sensor locks or passive alarms and the like are a good way to make something that doesn't ruin you if you don't have a decker but helps you if you do) that create choices based on a limited economy (such as processing power rather than action economy) so that they feel involved in the action actively making choices and tradeoffs that can have consequences for the team to make up for them not risking death..
Basically hackers can't just exist so the game has hackers, and the matrix system can't exist with the assumption that it will be used just to justify hackers. Many games exist with cool sensor and EWAR and computer rules (Traveller, EP, and many of the star trek RPGs come to mind) that justify tech abilities helping in scenes. Give hackers software to map relationships in social scenes, or make an action that represents a one and done action to get a bunch of personal dirt from a comlink and social media rather than creating a whole subscene where you painstakingly decrypt a bunch of different files from a comlink. Useful actionable abilities are what make a role a role. Hackers are currently designed like mages without any spells or spirits being in the game. The hacking subsystem can be tweaked and streamlined and improved as much as anyone cares to do it, but it is ultimately a subsystem looking for a point.
Same goes for security systems. If you make them as powerful/secure as they are in real life then you run the risk of making them to unbreakable for the average street level PC group to bypass and every run turns into a fire fight, which most teams are going to be outgunned in.
Security systems are not at all secure in real life. In fact, SR security systems tend to be unrealistically strong.
There is a reason the standard is to design as if you WILL face a major leak and to do things like storing secure information in a manner you yourself can't access it. Major companies don't just get minor data steals in real life, password pastebin leaks are a major thing (seriously, google 'have I been PWNed') and really basic well known ways to create system insecurity such as XSS vulnerabilities or failing to revoke session tokens still occur.
There are ways in which systems can be perfectly secure in theory (such as if you properly store passwords encrypted, hashed, and salted, or designing systems so that literally no one could access it besides the end user, even the service owner) but that isn't the same as the system not being subvertable: people regularly hack security cameras IRL and there are websites that are just live feeds of secure areas where no one bothered to change the default settings or the firmware for these high security bullet proof cameras has a crippling vulnerability that can never be fixed. Besides, realism doesn't really matter. What really matters is finding a way for hackers to 'do their thing' in a way that creates a good mechanical gameplay loop and is interesting in the context of going on shadowruns. After all, the entire concept of VR and 'jacking in' is entirely absurd in of itself, yet I think there would be riots if any hacking system didn't have a mechanic that massively rewarded you for plugging your brain into something that could fry it and going into a voulintary comatose state in order to play around in virtual space shooting laser beams out of your wacky custom avatar.
