I'll preface this by saying that my memory, as ever, is quite imperfect. I might be misremembering things, conflating one thing with another, or just not forgetting things outright, and I apologize in advance for that.
There is no one in this thread who could believe magic is a perfect substitute for ranged weaponry, not after seeing Mathilde use her guns in lieu of magic so recently, in the Dum expedition.
The Dum situation meant magic being curtailed, true, but that also included magical items, such as runed weaponry, so runes on guns would have failed as well. It's an argument to
maybe buy better guns, but not necessarily runed guns.
Similarly, there is no one who objects to runed guns on a monetary ground because that has no gold cost whatsoever: before the Dum expedition, it had only ever had a favour cost, and now it costs nothing.
I'll admit fault on this, I was thinking of prior proposals to purchase a rifle, dwarf or otherwise, for experiments on windherded enchantments or such.
Finally, I cannot seriously believe the weakness of gun runes specifically when compared to crossbow runes has anything but negligible sway over people's minds, given how the AP cost of training with crossbows means we'll never get one.
I might not have worded this correctly, apologies. It's not an argument for using runed crossbows over runed guns, but a statement that compared to runed crossbows, runed guns are lacking bang for buck, if you excuse the pun. The reason for this comparison is that, at the moment, runed crossbows are the closest comparison to what an enchanted gun might be able to do. Runed guns let you hit harder, to be sure, but they don't shoot flaming bullets or include other effects that runed crossbows, or enchanted guns, might have.
