I'm guessing not a lot of work is going into balancing weapons right now in 2.3 because so much is being worked on, but I'd imagine that in the future when the project gets close to a 2.3 release, when a "feature freeze" comes (and work goes heavily into working out bugs), that work would be done to balance all the weapons, armor, etc. around that time, but right now when so much is being changed in the code and features I don't think it makes sense to try to constantly balance all the weapons and such as it would slow things down, and the 2.3 version isn't fully playable anyways.
Regarding 2.2.1, yes, I like the laser weapons a lot from that version myself, I think they are quite useful in that version.
On a side note, I think the coilgun in 2.3 is cool, I've always liked weapons that are all-at-once and very powerful (at the expense of the number of shots/ammunition, the bulkiness, etc.).