>>23466921
A great number of Gundam fans, myself included, are also military otaku/sci-fi fans, sometimes more than anime fans, so fairly utilitarian designs appeal to us as they fit that bill better than something like, say, 00 Raiser or WZC.

In UC trying to be exciting is usually too prohibitively expensive to do on any scale that can change the course of a given war, and all the fancy, extravagantly kitted-out MS tend to get rekt by the "boring" utilitarian designs quite often, anyway, so even in-universe, the prevalence of utilitarian rifle and saber + shield loadout is kind of self perpetuating by simple virtue of being the META for most militaries.

>Thunderbolt
One of these things is not like the other. In fact, it could be argued Thunderbolt is all rule of cool all the time.