There are a number of folks who dislike the "Automatics' weapon skill as it covers way too many odd things. The method to fire a pistol accurately is vastly different than that of a longarm. If you watch the show Top Shot, people who use pistols all the time have hard times shooting rifles. Not used to having a stock. The recoil. The rates of fire. I would think any automatic would also be vastly different from pistols and longarms... only in the rate of fire vastly affects how you hold, aim, & use the weapon.

Would people feel better if the skills were broken down as follows?

Pistols - Hold Outs, Light, Heavy, Tasers, machine pistols
Longarms - shotguns, sports rifles, sniper rifles, assault rifles
Automatics - SMG's, LMGs, MMGs, HMGs

I had Automatics envelop parts of heavy weapons because I think the way you use a SMG, LMG, MMG, HMG is all pretty similar. You're not really "aiming", but just using the weapon's high RoF to throw lead down range & hope you hit/do damage.

Bad idea?

No. Just get rid of the Automatics skill completely and it'd be right as rain. The rules for burst and fully automatic fire already take into account their difficulty levels. Just add a specialization for each firing mode to reflect specific training and you're pretty much done. Pistols, Long Arms, and Heavy Weapons are perfectly acceptable and are both abstract and specific enough to fit in with the rest of the system.

The only thing you have to do is figure out what to do with hybrid weapons, like SMGs. Some are more pistol-like, some are more assault rifle-like. But that's a change that should be made for those specific weapons (possibly with a reclassification of some of them to Machine Pistols).

I kinda agree with Ol'Scratch. Not all automatics are so similar that skills transfer. Machine pistols make almost no sense in that slot, and how is a semi-auto assault rifle different from a semi-auto sport rifle? Skill-wise it's identical. I don't know what to do with SMGs, but that's mainly from how broad a term that is.

Not exactly, but could be better. Leave the bigger machineguns under the "Heavy Weapons" skill and make "Automatics" cover low-recoil automatic weapons like machine pistols (MAC10, Steyr TMP), submachine guns (MP5, full-size UZI) and PDW-class weapons (which are really fancy-named submachine guns, like P90 and MP7). Moving assault rifles to "Longarms" makes sense, though.

If I was remaking shadowrun, I'd probably only have one skill for firearms(I prefer a smaller list of broad skills), but if I split it up it would be Handguns, Longarms, and Heavy Weapons, which would be grouped together. I think the 1/2 handed distinction is pretty easy, but I don't like the automatic distinction. If I can fire an assault rifle, I can fire a sport rifle.

I usually do roughly as Seriously Mike suggested: just bump ARs into Longarms. I do think it's important to check, as Ol' Scratch mentions, if a given weapon is actually more like a pistol, or SMG. Some of the Arsenal machine pistols are probably just Pistols.

Machine Guns could be an ok alternative to Automatics. Of course this would only include actual machine guns, LMG, MMG, HMG, not sub-machine guns nor automatic rifles, nor automatic pistols. The best way is to simply eliminate Automatics.