I totally agree with you. There's practically no point in ARs right now. Any precision build can reduce your recoil, but it won't fix the terrible bullet spread, which starts at ~50m and beyond. After all, at closer range, you can choose a SMG, and even closer, a shotgun, and if you want to shoot at long range, you have a machine gun or a DMR.
The whole problem with ARs is that they should be exclusive to the Assault class, and only then can they be adequately balanced within their class. Otherwise (with the weapon unlock we have now), it's impossible to balance this class of weapons. If they're stronger than SMGs and carbines (which is logically what they should be, since carbines are inherently a weaker AR equivalent available to all classes), then everyone will only use them! Another question: why would an assault rifle need a weapon that's only usable in close-to-medium combat when you have a dedicated shotgun slot and a submachine gun, which now fire without recoil? (Hello, MP5.)
After all, it's much more fun and effective to just take a shotgun for slugs and one-shot everyone. Maybe I haven't unlocked a truly cool AR yet, but so far my impressions of the first three are disappointing; they're literally a pain if you want to use them as weapons for range of 50m~