Out of curiosity, from a looting and scavenging perspective, what excited you then? Do you get excited to find a gun? Do you find them too early, late, right on time? Does finding a mod actually get ya excited? If so, what about the new mod is exciting?
I can give my reasons for preferring prior loot systems over A17's (not that you were asking me, but I thought I'd chip in).
Parts were preferable to finding the whole gun because it drew the experience out a little. Even better, it suited the workbench system well, because the parts could be
reasonably common, but only for fairly low levels.
So, I could find a sniper barrel reasonably easily say, but it'd likely be a low-level one. I could, having found all the parts, assemble a sniper rifle reasonably soon, but being made up of poor parts, it to, would be a low-level one. But as I found more of each part, I could extract its corresponding part from my gun, combine the two in the workbench and make a slightly better sniper rifle. I could use this system repeatedly to slowly end up with a Q600 sniper rifle that made me feel all happy inside. ;-)
The point being, I didn't get the whole gun in one go, but, I also didn't have
too much trouble in finding parts for it, and each time I
did find parts for it, I was able to slightly improve the one I had.
It also worked for late gun trading, since once I had a 2nd Q600 gun of any type, I'd flog it off to the trader and begin working on the next Q600 on to build (always retaining one Q600 gun of each type for myself).
I do miss that about prior Alphas.