I call upon the Giant Robot!

[deadpan29]

On the subject of heat as a balance mechanism, it was pointed out that BattleTech started out as a tabletop game where players had to keep track of the heat, and so it was simpler to have one heat value for the robot. It also dealt with firing rates for weapons without having to keep track of the weapons separately.
For a computer game, the computer should be perfectly capable of tracking heating, overheating, and firing rates separately for each weapon.
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No, I don't believe the world has gone mad.  In order for it to go mad it would need to have been sane at some point.