That gun was my best overall gun for 15 character levels or so. I used other stuff situationally but that gun is good close and at range and the ammo is cheap and everywhere.
I am like L39 and I just wrapped up one of the faction quest lines and found a completely sick and OP rifle called Revenant. It has trivialized combat even cranked up to very hard. The only real bottleneck would potentially be ammo but you can give a gun to your buddy with just 1 round of the correct ammo and they never run out of ammo...and while you can't tell them what gun to use you can make them use what you want by just giving them 1 gun. They seem to default to using the highest value gun they have on them, assuming it has ammo, even though they might have a different specialty and I am pretty sure this is the highest value gun I have found.
Also if anyone cares, on the topic of weapons, each weapon has a base model and then four other levels where the stats of the weapon improve at each rank. These are indicated by Calibrated, Refined, Advanced, Superior. There is no way to change a weapon's level (AFAIK).
The color of the weapon's name is tied to rarity which adds 1-3 additional properties depending on whether it's blue, purple or orange and will also change the name of the gun based on the rarity bonuses it has. There is, again AFAIK, no way to change a weapon's rarity or the bonus properties it has.
What you can change, on everything, are the mods. Weapon mods are pretty great in the game and each weapon has fixed mod slots with different mods available for different weapons. You need all 4 ranks of weapon engineering and then 1 rank of special projects or something like that to unlock all mods. Some weapons have.
I don't think you can mod melee but I don't melee. Also you can rename any gun at a weapon bench if that is your thing. Finally, weapon modding does use a ton of different crafting junk. I mule all my crafting shit to the chest in the Lodge that has all the work benches. It has an unlimited capacity and when I want to mod something I just fast travel there, grab all the shit in the chest, mod away, then put all crafting mats back in the chest. Multiple times I found out I was short on things and had to put together a grocery list and hop around New Atlantis, Akila City, etc. So if that annoys you then gun modding isn't for you. I would google what you need and it is always for sale someplace.
I'm not completely sure how the 'named' weapons (unique stuff only available in certain spots or from specific quests) work but I think despite their names, behind the names they work on the same systems above, just 'hidden' behind the names.