They kind of are though. They excel from mid range/close range and have great moving DPS and the satchel. My idea is to specialize them as pure assault infantry, with a flamer, satchel, relevant veterancy and appropriate cost so that they're an option as just assault infantry instead of replacement infantry. You could then potentially give them 2-3 ppsh with the package ability.
There are a lot of cool M3A1 ideas, hope the unit gets some mid-late game love in the next patch.
It says redesign, not buff. The idea is to keep the power level the same while making it more fun and flexible to play Soviets.
Flamer on Penal is bad for many reasons:
Weapons with concentrated DPS on durable units with lots of entities is creates issues since the DPS drop off is small.
Finally the idea of making T1 optional is seem also redundant. Soviet where designed to be used with 2 building, then they where changed to 3 and now changing to 4 seem to serve little purpose.
Weapons like flamers that that bypass the cover mechanism on units that can become the core of the army is again bad design.
SMG and flamers are not a good combination especially with current formation (flamer front smgs back) because the contribution of smgs is very limited.
Imo there should be changes to both Penal and T1 but not at this direction.