Did some napkin maths to figure out just how shit the FO4 weapon balancing (for a given caliber) is.
FO1-2 .223 small guns (Classic fallout doesn't have .308 with the given reason it was exceedingly rare)
-Hunting Rifle
-Sniper Rifle
-.223 Pistol
Respective damage per action point.
-Hunting Rifle: 4 damage
-Sniper Rifle: 5.6 damage
-.223 Pistol: 6 damage (technically has armor penetrate perk so it's even more in practice)
All righty so we have three weapons ranging from 'weapon you can find at the start of the game' to 'literal best .223 small gun in the game'.
Difference per action point? 50% bonus damage comparing the worst to the best. Against heavy armor it's even better, but against a naked target this is what you get.
Doesn't sound like much but that can be the difference between killing an enemy per turn, or every 2 turns. Which means you take double damage in return. This is very important.
Fallout 4 .308 small guns, same 'class' of 'punchy relatively slow firing guns'.
-Pipe revolver
-Bolt action pipe rifle
-Hunting Rifle
-Combat rifle
Respective damage per 10 seconds. (no perks, just base max-modded stats)
-Pipe revolver: 294
-Bolt action pipe rifle: 102
-Hunting Rifle: 165
-Combat rifle: 2793
Alrighty so we should see an obvious problem here, the worst weapon is doing 1/27th the damage of the best weapon, that is to say you need 27 times the time to kill an enemy despite firing the same rounds at them. Hypothetically lets say it's a rather tanky enemy who requires 30 seconds of concentrated fire to put down, this means it's going to take a fun 13 minutes to actually put down. Dear lord and hope it doesn't regenerate either.
Now granted the pipe guns are meant to be thrown away pretty quickly, shockingly the pipe revolver has three times the DPS of it's pipe rifle counterpart, and nearly twice the DPS of the actual proper maxxed out hunting rifle.
To make this clear, a fully upgraded 'actual firearm' is outcompeted by a fucking pipebomb waiting to happen.
The worst culprit of the .308 saga is the combat rifle, which utterly renders every other gun in it's ammo type worthless by a stupid degree, to get the same parity the fallout 1-2 .223 pistol would have to be doing some 540 damage per shot, which would 1 shot everything in the game aside from Frank Horrigan. That's how outlandish the scaling is.
Now granted obviously there are going to be disconnects between turn based and real-time combat systems, and DPS generally scales with fire rate. Except a proper competent game developer would ensure guns of a given caliber aren't doing 27 fucking times the damage of weapons in it's class, the combat rifle should not have been able to load .308, and the .308 weapons should've got a huge damage buff to counteract how slow they fire.