Elite Riflemen: I don't own WFA therefore I can only judge it from an adversary perspective as Ostheer. They seem to be acceptable now at the 300mp + long Cool-down introduced in yesterdays patch. Still maybe a 280Mp + 5 fuel cost + long cooldown to reduce veted riflemen spam would be worth testing?
Red Army weapon teams (Maxim): No just no. It's unnecessary to reduce the squads from 6 to 4, unless Relic plans to redesign the whole Red Army faction around 4 men weapon teams. Maxims are not over performing, as many have said it's a L2P issue. It's only a hot-topic due to german fanboys failing to adapt and counter it and no the maxim range is the same as the MG42 and has a much narrower arc of fire on top of that.
It's quite manageable in 1v1 as maxim spam leaves an opponent open for a hard counter; and in 2v2 and up, just ignore the maxim spammer, cap the side of the map where he is not present. Then later get a stuka zu fuss or LE18 ISG and punish him, there problem solved. Only fools go bang their heads over & over against a maxim wall... the maxim wall can't be everywhere. I've never had much of a headache against this spam tactic.
If you reduce them to 4 men, they better get some impressive buffs as the whole concept of the soviet faction seems to be reliant on weapon support teams glued together by puny conscripts for merging or serving as damage sponges/spotters for said support weapons. The Red Army's infantry just can't compete against axis infantry, it's up to the support weapons or vehicles to do it.
Long Range Weapon Combat: What Cruzz stated
While there are some minor performance issues with short range firearms, the fundamental issue is just ease of use. With how the system is setup right now, you get very good performance just by selecting all your LMG armed long-range infantry, and amoving towards the enemy. By contrast trying to use short range troops generally involves much more roundabout maneuvering to setup flanks, use of smoke, and so on, yet the cost performance of these short range units is generally not THAT much better than the LMG blob.
While just reducing long range damage somewhat is an option, I do think it could be interesting if the LMG damage was made to spread damage on the entire enemy squad instead of focused on a single model. Right now a big part of the power of LMGs is that they will very quickly snipe off members from the enemy squad, forcing shorter range troops to just run away because having half a squad in melee doesn't really help them. Spread the damage out and you'll instead have a much larger though lower health squad coming into melee instead, which could actually do something. It would also make MGs a bit more efficient against LMG blobbing, because right now the gunner just gets instakilled in a row because all the fire is focused on him due to him being the most forward member of the MG squad.
Lastly I agree with the observations provided by Somenbjorn/Napalm regarding the faction specific long combat ranged DPS issues with the Red Army. They are lacklustre when it comes to effective ranged DPS, even Guards get outclassed by riflemen with BAR/LMGs or upgraded axis infantry, hence the reliance on maxims and mortars to deal damage at range.