i guess my confusion came from the fact that the UK invasion server, which also uses persistent stats, never had any weapon restrictions from the get go. matter of fact, the US invasion server is the only server i've played on where i noticed needing to rank up to use certain weapons. that said, i've always needed to rank up in order to have a larger squad to command and earn artillery strikes regardless of what server i'm on, and i'm totally okay with that.

regarding 'mediocre weapons', i've definitely found the ak47 and shotgun to be lacking for my personal playstyle. unless an enemy is standing directly in front of you or you simply get lucky, you're pretty much stuck camping somewhere, sending yourself to the chopping block ad-nauseum, or driving trucks and apcs in circles until you get enough kills to finally rank up. i found those first 2-3 levels of ranking pretty tedious, whereas once i was able to use the g36 and m16, my accuracy shot way up and ranking up was a breeze. i would suggest allowing the g36 for private rank as well, but that's just based on my personal experience. you might be able to attribute my experience with those initial weapons with lag, but if i lacked the patience or was a casual player i'd likely have just ignored that server in leiu of one that didn't restrict me to a specific style of playing.

There aren't really "mediocre" weapons. I would say that every weapon is almost equal in effectiveness, it's just that in some conditions one weapon might be better than the other. At rank 0 you always can start with an AK47 and this weapon is definitely good enough to compete with most other weapons.