[OxBlood]

That was my experience too. I used Shotguns in my first playthrough and now I´m a member of the church of the Holy Handgun that is just superior to about anything else in the arsenal.
The combination of crit-shot from cover and Chainshot makes it severely unbalanced...sure, I´m able to knock people down with my shotgun but in the same time I could just shoot them in the head with my pistol and be done with it.

I really think, someone in the development team convinced the others to make a game that has this "you CAN play in any way you want, it just doesn´t make much sense"-thing and somehow they rolled with it...