>>64277320
>I would argue that technical design details do indeed matter in defining a weapon because how a weapon is designed and what it is designed for can significantly inhibit a weapons usefulness in certain areas, and if it's poor enough in one area, then still labelling it as is doesn't accurately reflect its actual capabilities as a weapon regardless of if you do actually use it in that role.
The structural capabilities of it are not as significant as the intended role, its doctrinal use. The structural details always follow the intended role and are entirely secondary to the fulfillment of the role. It's always the role that matters the most and which defines the weapon system.
If you label a weapon system by its structural qualities, then that definition will itself be deprecated and useless the moment an advancement in technology happens. It just doesn't function and isn't genuinely useful at all. It's an autistic-pedantic method that fails to communicate the weapon system's nature in a military setting: A heavy machine gun does heavy machine gun stuff, and that's what the naming convention has to reflect. If you give me a heavy machine gun platoon, the naming tells me everything I need to know about the platoon's use and how I should deploy them. I know their limitations and how they should NOT be employed.

>And to my knowledge, the BREN wasn't good for sustained fire
That may be so, but the tripod was called the Sustained Fire Tripod. Being bad at fulfilling your role does not mean you aren't still identified as that role. The Bren itself was originally sought out as a GPMG to replace the other MGs like the Vickers, but it simply wasn't very useful for that purpose (or very useful in the first place). The British rifle battalions did not have any other machine gun in them except for the Bren. Machine gun battalions were a divisional asset. The Bren was used for general purposes by the British.