That's not a bad idea actually, where you can only use the points once to buy equipment/weapons for the next round. So you constantly have to do well to ensure you get better gear in subsequent rounds. Yea I'll think about that some more and prototype it.
That would make good sense mid-game, too. Currently you can land on a pad and hit start (enter on keyboard I believe) and it will allow you to switch to other weapons that you can afford. I like the idea of switching setups mid-game, but it has the effect of making the initial pre-match setup screen a bit pointless. But if you get awarded points for kills and can then land on a pad to spend those points on switching to a different weapon that'd work quite well I think.
Weapon balance I'll work more on, I do like the flares - the main problem is finding people to play the game with to actually test the weapon balance, we need a group of people that want to play regularly together to work on smoothing that out.