Railway arty
200 munis for a single stuka bomb with the longest delay in terms on audio and visual cues. The 2nd and 3rd shells land so far off the target and the delay of those shells are also ridiculously long. Yes offense, if u get hit by the 2nd or 3rd and it's not an emplacement, u should uninstall the game immediately, you're that bad you're beyond saving.
Compare with I&R pathfinder arty, railway is a joke. Pathfinder arty comes down faster, its shells land in quicker succession, and the scatter is much tighter and the shells are almost as impactful as the railway arty shells, for only 140 munis.
200MU for a gaurenteed wipe on a howitzer, and a huge area denial. As you say - it is very easy to avoid being in the area. But doing so means you have to vacate a massive section of the map, and sometimes you simply cannot afford that risk. For 200 MU it does what it needs to pretty fine, which is land one accurate shell and then run a gambit with your opponent about if they want to stay in the area or not.
As others have said, the IR pathfinder artillery is better against a single target but it also requires a unit to be on the field and pretty close to what you want to hit. Offmaps can be slung anywhere on the map that you have line of sight.
Light arty barrage
Another joke of a barrage for 100 munis. Major arty is sometimes better than this expensive, doctrinal POS of an ability. The scatter is not very tight, and the shells are somewhat delayed.
Compare with cluster bombs for 110 munis. The shells literally GUARANTEE a wipe if u don't retreat in time. There is NO scatter. Way better than what Ost gets.
I've walked through cluster bombs and survived with squads, I've walked through light arty and survived with squads.
Both of them are very good counters to AT guns (and other weapon teams), doubly so if they moved together and parked together. I think this one is just confirmation bias.
I'm fairly certain the time for the light arty shells to land is lower than the butterfly bombs because of the parachute animation, but I will happily stand corrected if somebody wants to go and time it.
Frag bombs
For 180 munis, I expect more damage to tanks, for example the Soviet bombing run is very damaging to all units.
It already does great damage to light vehicles. It won't do the same damage to heavy vehichles, but the area that it hits is
substantially larger and it is much more dangaerous to infantry.
You pay less, you get something a little different, but its still good.
Stuka dive bomb
It was definately OP before, but now the kill radius is fairly small. Just revert cost to 160. As usual, Ost getting the short end of the stick and it was TRIPLE nerfed. Sound familiar? (Brum, Stug, etc.)
One shots on map field guns. If you want to do that without RNG, you need to pay big. 160 would be far too cheap for that alpha strike.