You know what? I don’t think they did - or rather it’s an unforseen circumstance of the Skills Sandbox JG clearly favours.
People played BB5 for nigh on 2 months. I never had the time to get a Squaddie to Lvl 7, but plenty of others did. I was commenting daily on how OP Dash & Return Fire and a couple of the other Skills were, and as a result they got nerfed in time for 1.0.
No-one mentioned Sniper/Heavy Rage Burst. That didn’t appear until about 2 weeks into 1.0, and when it did, nobody believed it until the guy who found it posted a demo tape. Then everyone was using it. So it’s clearly not as obvious as people make out in retrospect. It was bound to be uncovered
eventually, and my opinions on that are fairly comprehensively laid out in A Call for Cooldowns. Same for 100% Infiltrator.
The thing is, there is nothing inherently wrong in any of these combos (except a Sniper Rifle should never be able to act like a machine-gun in my opinion), it’s just that as they stand there is no downside to them. What XCOM always got very right in my opinion is the way each of its OP skills had some sort of balancing element, whether it be a cooldown period or a reduction in accuracy, or some such.
What’s wrong with PP Skills to me at the moment, is there is no balancing element. So a Sniper/Heavy can empty her magazine with pinpoint accuracy across the entire length of the map, and the only thing she loses is a clip of ammo. Why wouldn’t you do that if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the difficulty spike? But tie that to a Gatling Gun with a stupidly wide targeting reticle, in the hands of a Squaddie with the speed of a sloth, and suddenly it’s only useful if you can lure the target into fairly close range - like charging distance for a Scylla. I have no problem with that - it’s a massively OP skill, with a limited area of usage (and see So… Rage Burst can no longer cover multiple targets for a set of very sensible suggestions from other people about how to limit it further.)
So no, I have nothing against Squaddie Skills per se. My beef is with unbalanced Squaddie Skills that clearly break the game, and I shall continue to point those out and make suggestions about how to balance them whenever and wherever I find them.