Replacing spawn weapons

While I agree with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" argument, I have to say that when I first started playing, I was pretty underwhelmed by the shotgun in comparison to the rest of the game design. I mean here's a game with futuristic weapons, some of which have amazing functionality, and you start with a regular shotgun with a slap for it's alt-fire. Very unimaginative, imo. And on top of that, having the alt-fire on a shotgun as a melee makes no sense at all, because a shotgun is already a close range weapon. It would have made far more sense to add the melee to the laser.

So yeah, the balance is great right now and I don't want to see it messed up, but the shotgun is still lame.