Players of a certain age will remember Murmur. Restricting weapon elements seemed pretty arbitrary when it was done, but I can understand why they would want to keep things as-is now. We have elemental keyword perks that didn't exist back then, and it makes sense for Incandescent to only be on Solar weapons, Voltshot on Arc etc. We know Bungie have been experimenting with allowing keywords to be usable outside of their respective subclasses - e.g. Devour from Buried Bloodline, Amplified from Ex Diris - but I think changing weapon elements might go a bit too far. For example, you could have a Void Ammit with Incandescent, so it would apply Scorch and also benefit from Volatile Rounds.

They only did it bc the top dps combo was the ikelos shotgun w/ tractor cannon at the time. Bungie didn’t like it when we could make any weapon void and get that damage buff so they took that ability away. I still have some mismatched element weapons in my vault but they made some of them locked in a specific element.

I saw no reason to restrict elements like they did back when Forsaken launched. The change made no sense to me, and when I see a lot of a certain weapon type with the same frame having the same element now, I feel that my line of thinking is justified in that regard. There have been times a couple of years ago where I've felt very restricted on finding certain kinds of weapons. Most of the time I came up with something, the thought also ended with "but you have to do a raid to see if it drops". But it really depended on how specific of a weapon I was looking for. Sometimes it still seems that way to me and that depends on loot and their sources. Did you know that there is no random-roll legendary Void glaive in the game at all? You can craft one and then you can also buy one with a static roll. To a lesser extent, there are 4 Adept Adaptive Frame hand cannons that exist in the game and they are comprised of 2 Kinetic and 2 Void hand cannons. But as for crafting weapons specifically, if we were allowed to change the elements of weapons, that may conflict with the current circumstances of subclass verb weapon traits, at least from a view-point standard. I don't think the element system is going to be changing anytime soon. But maybe I'm just not seeing it right. That might require me to think a bit more.

Bungie should also allow any three types of weapons to be carried. Special and Heavy are and can be limited by ammo and they can make it so that banners only work for 1 special and 1 heavy weapon.

Waste of space and takes away build craft. We used to change on elements on year 1 weapons. Soon those weapons just gathered dust. Too much junk in the vaults. And sunset happened.