Yep, I agree, the team is very talented at making bad impressions on new (and old) customers.
You are not totally SOL, however. You can unlock the weapon in your collections so that you can reclaim unlimited copies of it among all your legacy characters. This costs extra CC (400 for a gold item like those cartel market weapons) but at least it's an option.
And as the poster above pointed out, you can put mods in the shell so that it is as powerful as any other weapon.
Hope you have a better experience of SWTOR in the future. Despite the developers' efforts alienate their playerbase, there's still a lot of fun to be had playing this game. Cheers.