Gold order guns don’t really serve a purpose other than be unique collectibles.
But having a collectible is different from having a useful tool.
Before the merge, gold order guns were more suppletory in character. If you just started a fresh campaign, gold order guns were a way to access more powerful weapons that would otherwise not be available until the end of the campaign. After you unlock these more powerful guns, continuing to use gold order weapons would be a matter of preference instead of practicality. Mkb 42 (Ws), any of the drum-fed semi-automatic rifles, and so on.
On the other end of the spectrum, they may be completely unique to a faction and become a way to access a specific archetype of weapon that is otherwise unavailable to the faction as a whole. BAR-type weapons for the Japanese or German factions in the FN Model 1930, SMGs with LMG levels of magazine capacity like the LAD or Conders.
But with the consolidation of campaigns and introduction of the BR system, buying gold order weapons no longer fulfill the former niche, leaving gold order weapons as mere collectibles, with the occasional stand-out meta choice every couple of seasons. This is particularly worsened by the fact that gold weapon orders are, generally, quite rare, and at the present, redeeming a gold weapon order for one faction means the other 3 of the 4 playable factions don’t have one.
The leading question is-
Why would anyone willingly buy a gold order weapon that has an equivalent tech tree unlock?
My proposal is that gold order weapons with an equivalent or near-equivalent tech tree unlock should have lower BRs than their tech tree equivalents.
This excludes gold order weapons with a special property that is generally not found in a campaign’s unlocks. Things like the G43 Kurz, the Breda PG (CR) will retain their current BRs,
But weapons like the Erma 44 EMP, the VMP, the gold order PPDs, the Pedersen Rifle, and so on will have their BR reduced by one.
This expands the value of gold order weapons as lower-BR alternatives that are balanced by the inherent rarity of gold order weapons. At the quantities you can purchase, generally, you can only equip 1 squad worth of the same weaponry.
Committing to multiple squads for the same nation would require a substantially heavier investment, and are also limited by the variety of gold weapons available in the first place.
Make gold weapons worth the rarity.