o please gilders squid is pretty good but it ain't no puppy fur squid(no offense gilder)... and just in case it needs to be said again flamers are where they should be; my crew keeps up chem cycles and heat sink rounds and we literally laugh at incoming flamers...
I would say "laugh" at flamers is an overstatement, as they still do unignorable damage. Furthermore, this is flamers in a vacuum (hah! like that would ever work), and this is something that no other gun necessitates: an entire strategy and gear setup just to combat it.
You always pay a price to have a chem spray rotation, and you pay that through
1. Lowered engineer gun uptime. Not sure if this is prevalent enough if you spray at the right time.
2. Lowered repair efficiency. Since chem lasts 20? seconds and mallet cd is 9, chem is 5, you either respray early and waste 5 seconds of uptime or spray late and risk 5 seconds of downtime.
3. Lack of buff hammer, or fewer buff hammer.
4. Chaos, fires everywhere if you ever mess up your rotation.
I will say heatsink ammo is something I don't see nearly enough gunners bringing, and I think it needs to be buffed to be able to used to douse fires as well, possibly at the expense of ammo count for that reload (10% ammo penalty for each stack of fire maybe?).
Also keep in mind rigorous chem spray rotation is not an option for many captains/crews because many players lack the teamwork (esp pug games) and awareness to do this.
I do not play competitively and I'm sure the flamer is far less useful there, but on pub games (even ones with mostly high level/competitive players), the flamer dominates, and I have yet to find a pug crew who successfully deals with high flamer uptime. Of course you can kill flamer ships before they get close, and good pilots know how to avoid, but actually having a flamer on target is utterly devastating, and I think you'll find in the majority of games the flamer just wins out. Almost every ship I flown on or against has one.