Unpopular opinion: I don't find the bugs at all fun to fight

1) Sure, there are more technically-viable weapons for bugs than bots. But at the end of the day, you really need a large mag and medium pen to survive on higher difficulties. You need, at minimum, an answer to Stalkers, Bile Spewers, and Chargers in your loadout, and imo this massively limits what weapons meaningfully contribute vs bugs. I can do a level 10 bot mission with a Sickle, a Senator, and a RR. Medium pen is nice to have but far from necessary as everything on bots below a hulk has light-pen weak spots that are easy to hit with good aim. That same loadout on bugs suffers from shitty weak points and eventual ammo issues in spite of itself.

2) -and this is the big one- The dearth of methods to destroy bug nests, and the number of bug holes per nest limit you to a few viable grenade/secondary (too little ammo for the sheer number of holes to plug on any given map)/stratagem (too long of a cooldown to be truly viable) options. Every other faction has multiple means of taking down a production facility - and has them in fewer numbers than bug nests.

I have working loadouts for bugs but I hate running them regardless, because it feels like there's zero room for experimentation. It's just check boxes A, B, C and go. It's kind of gotten to where I just skip out on bug weeks, because I'd rather hit myself with a hammer in the balls than play this faction everyone seems to love for some reason.