The problem isn't AS at all, the problem stems from the way Funcom has handled defenses in AO for the longest time. The rampant abuse of AS is a symptom of that. The issue originates from the gameplay decisions that Funcom has made, basically:
1. Perk attacks have a long cooldown.
2. Burst damage is required to kill a majority of classes, and required to kill all classes in a mass PvP situation where docs are involved.
3. Evades vs Perks makes a situation where defense is either on or off, there's no middle ground when it comes to perking a target.
When you combine the three of these, you get a situation where a lot of classes need their perks to land to finish a target off before the target can heal/mitigate damage. However, as more than half of the classes in the game focus on evasion you end up with players who have 0 chance at endgame to be able to perk some classes. These lower AR professions/players then start thinking “What can I do to give me a better chance against these players I cannot perk?” They come to a similar conclusion as the rest of the playerbase, and have a few choices as to how they wish to combat evades.
The first choice, considering a majority of classes in this game have access to some form of ranged weaponry is of course, Aimed Shot. AS has the added benefit of being able to also assist in bursting down higher-hp classes that were already perkable, making it an even better choice. The next choice is MR, only available to the Atrox breed, it isn’t quite as wide spread as use of AS, and it only has major benefits against targets that you couldn’t perk before. It’s a popular choice for perk based professions like shade, since so much of their damage can come from perks and MR allows them to land these on defensive 220s even as low a level 207.
What Funcom is doing post rebalance to AS isn’t going to solve the problem; it’s simply going to make the solution less effective. Players are always going to look for the best possible setup that gives them the best chance to defeat the largest percentage of other professions in PvP. If no alternatives to AS pop up then it will simply become a case of support/ranged professions rooting/stunning high evade melee players before using AS on them. Even against professions that didn’t have evades before the most it will do is make AS an opener, and then if you’re a high HP profession like enfo they’ll probably still use it, even with the 3s cast time simply because it can 30% cap, because it is still better overall damage than they’d get by just DPSing you regularly.
The true solution to this whole AS issue is a lot more complicated than “slap a 3s wind up time on it and give agents burst as compensation.” The only way you’re going to coax people away from AS weapons is by giving them a viable alternative in the form of another attack, or perks that actually do something against evade professions.
Post is pretty messy but I'll edit it to be readable later, out of time to post for now.