Eh, there’s a lot of things you wouldn’t be able to safely do with the classic Wolverine-style claws out. It’s not that far-fetched.
Embrace the power of “and” - there’s no reason both couldn’t be developed.
Actually, I think having a bionic “weapons arm”, able to hold one of several weapons, would be quite useful, and having other flavors of the finger-laser (that would have to be deployed, making the hand unusable) is also a good idea.
For balance, I would think the “weapons arm” weapons would probably need to provide better firepower (some combination of higher rate of fire, more damage, greater accuracy, and/or lower energy cost, quite possibly all of the above in different combinations depending on the weapon attachment chosen), as the disadvantage, while not nearly as ridiculous as the current one, would be “always on”.
Example: fusion blaster. The current fusion blaster could be mounted on the bionic weapon arm “as is”, providing all the benefits of the current fusion blaster with no loss or even USE of hand, just with a permanent “mutant” torso (need the “oversized anatomy” type clothing). It could also be mounted in the arm itself, able to be deployed (rendering that hand unusable while deployed - basically, all of the current penalties, but only while deployed), but only doing 3/4 of the damage and/or having a lower rate of fire (justified by having to be careful with the amount of heat generated, lest it burn the flesh it’s mounted inside of).
Both of those are viable, really, and even making the weapons arm only count as “oversized” when it has a weapon attached would be feasible (assuming that changing weapons takes a good bit more time than swapping wielded weapons).
Also, the weapons arm concept would allow the mounting of non-energy weapons - the point would be the extra, semi-autonomous weapon, not just the bionic power pool (think War Machine from the Iron Man movies).
