Have been re-reading the rules and I just can’t see any reason why you would ever take them at their current cost (the whole point of them is to shore up your numbers whilst your gangers are in recovery but due to their cost being equal to or likely more than hiring a gang member then of course you’d just take the gang member. Cheap, expendable mooks they ain’t!)
So house rule time, hired guns now cost 15 creds+weapon costs and they count towards the maximum number of crew members allowed when determining crew size for scenarios.