Remember when the very first Battlefield with unlocks allowed you to choose what class you wanted them for, so you could just pick the gun you wanted? Never had any problems with the devs putting a gun at rank 50 or some shit and forcing you to grind through every other gun in the game first. I remember that.
Actually I guess you did need to get the basegame gun for any specific class before you could get the expansion gun. But that still wasn't too bad.