Wow that was indeed long but the most surprising thing was it was actually well thought out. Kudos
I agree with the whole, i (as i said many times before) don't want the sniper in PS to be a 1 man army, nobody should not a MAX, not a tank,nothing.
However if the sniper would need 2-3 headshots for a kill on any armor than it would become useless or rather nearly useless. The only thing you could do as a sniper would be shoot the guy once and either try to get him again and pray your lucky and/or he is dumb or run away.
I think (as stated before) the empashis should be on making headshots lethal on anything except med and MAX armors but make said headshots very hard to do on a moving target and make reload time long enough to make the 1st shot important and not just shoot as many times as you want in 5 secs.
And heck if you guys are really that worried about every "n00b" becoming a sniper then demand that they include a sniper cert that would cost a lot of cert points so that only those who want to snipe and only snipe become snipers. Or if you grab a bolt driver you can only carry that and a pistol. Something along those lines so that the sniper is still able to do his job and kill from a distance but is screwed if he doesn't have the smarts and the skillz to pull it off.
You know now that i think of it i really really hope the sniper can't carry anything except a pistol and maybe a few nades. It would make the sniper a lot more real and fun.
Again Kudos Dragoon on a well thought out and respectful post.