Oddly enough the scatter table is more forgiving in the 4ed rules than the 4A.
Someone in the powers that be has it in their heads that grenades are "too easy", in particular, the option to target a location instead of a live target.
in the pre-SR4A era, they had issued a FAQ answer that tried to bring "player intent" into the mix, saying that targeting locations was disallowed if the player was intending to damage moving targets in the blast radius, that the only option is to directly target one of the potential victims in the blast radius.
There were some protests to this restriction, one of which was that it was unnecessary because it didn't look at the "big picture" of grenade usage. Sure targeting a location that can't dodge makes for an easier test with more successes, but that ease comes with a sacrifice. The original SR4 rules allowed extra successes on the attack roll to begin to stage up the damage of the grenade once scatter was reduced to zero, but only the damage felt by what you were targeting; blast radius and splash damage are still calculated off the base damage of the grenade. Essentially, a grenade that catches a good bounce and goes off in mid-air an inch from your chest is going to hurt more than one that lands twelve inches from your feet, even though both of those grenades have less than 1 meter of scatter from their target, and letting an especially skillful roll stage up damage once scatter goes to zero represents that. The catch being, when you target a location, you're foregoing the opportunity to stage the damage up against any of the live targets in the blast radius. Sure it's an easier throw, but the potential payoff is lessened because of it.
(The other "big picture" item to consider about grenades and their ease of use is that they're not particularly 'shadowy'. A grenade gets tossed on a run, and the opposition suddenly has justification to bring out a military-grade anti-terrorist response, which may very well bring their own grenades to toss back at the runners.)
One proposed solution was for the players to invest in a bag of cheap rat bio-drones, and keep them drugged up so that their agility and dodge were at the bare minimum. When you need to target a location, pull a rat-drone out of the bag, send it to that location, and then announce to the GM that you "intend" to target the rat. You get a throw that's almost as easy as targeting the location, while still meeting the FAQ's requirements for "player intent."
Another proposed solution was to just ignore that FAQ answer as it wasn't supported by the Rules As Written. After all, changes to the rules, especially ones that can invalidate combat tactics, should be put into the errata and rolled into the next printing.
So, when they came out with SR4A, they took out the part about extra successes staging the damage up against your specified target once the scatter had been reduced to zero. And to make sure that you're not likely to have extra successes that won't be doing anything anymore, they increased the scatter ranges to make you work harder. Nice of them to make sure that you wont feel that your well spent skill points are being wasted.
And now, because there's no difference now between a really successful throw that was aimed at a person and one that was aimed at a location, the FAQ answer's instructions to treat a throw against a location as if it had been thrown at a one of the mobile targets in the blast radius is workable, even if still not supported by the RAW.
