Alright I see your point about team games.
Penals are a bad design so far because they haven't found a utility for them, instead of fixing the issue that is Soviet's teching flow they just made them a sort of overperforming "anti-infantry" unit.
By their own word, "we're making penals a dedicated anti-infantry unit".
Then by the next patch, they give them PTRS and anti-tank satchels.... zzzz...
They are clueless about soviets, I don't know who exactly, but they are clueless, they just seem to address the wrong stats whenever balancing their units.
They made DSHK completely shit, axis tears complaining it was instapinning their units, when the MG42 literally has the same stats except the arc and range.
The Maxims? Another bad design, it was easy to spam, so what do they do? They make it bad at everything, setting up, dps and suppression rate.
Why not increase DPS and give it a mild setting up time? So it does what it's suppose to: support your infantry.
Whats worse is that the MG42 and Vickers are better at EVERYTHING, so it can be spammed just as easy, and support infantry better than maxims because it can be used offensively.
So yeah, I get where you are coming from about penals, but it's truly a problem with soviet's teching, not penals only.
To find a new and appropriate use for penals, they need to revamp the teching, and ditch that idea about making penals somewhat a better anti-infantry when soviets already have guards and shocks, and their design has always been to get cheap infantry units that are aided by elite ones, or rely on fast and cheap tanks.
Penals just don't fit in all of this, but since you have nothing else going for them, you will just end up doing guards+penals because it works, on any map, any mode, any scenario.
Soviet are currently the one of the stronger factions in the game, if that is only a result of Penal, the faction is badly design and the meta will always remain T1.
The rest of the post are simply flawed theories which I will not even bother responding to.
Don't be surprised, but it is actually only thanks to penals and guards.
Remove this and soviets are suddenly the weakest faction.
They were the worst faction before they buffed penals, also remember that before then, it was nothing but maxim spam if you wanted to win.
Soviets have been a cheesy faction thorought the all of COH 2 history, every meta has been nothing but cheesey strats, from scout car+snipers to maxim spam.