Greetings, my little minions.
I thought a bit, another bit and a half one about how to make the operatives more useful aside from the hacking objectives, where they - rumour has it - absolutely excel cough. (Please note that I am trying to discuss this from a competetive point of view, so don’t annoy me with cortex bomb and emp grenades, which are forbidden in most competitions - yeah, it’s a shame)
Their grenade-ish abilities are primarily defensive ones and I won’t accept any opposite arguments 
Yet their only purpose, the hacking, is performed offensively, be it main or secondary objective. On the contrary, the engineer provides an excrementload of stuff that greatly affects the game, which is also the reason the engineers finished first in the “your favourite class” poll. They have the turrets, the mines, the weapon buff and the kevlar buff - surely they can exchange some awesomeness, can’t they?
Now, there are several suggestions already about making some general abilities class abilities and such, but I’ll try to solve that a bit smoother. The engineer could have it’s own Brink mod tbh - he provides damage boost AND the counter, kevlar wests, and he provides mines AND is the only one who can defuse them - pretty egoistic.
tl;dr - In my opinion, the Operative should be able to hand out the weapon buff. In exchange, the Engineer should be given the caltrop grenade. (Kevlar turns into engineers main buff)
Result: The operative receives a massive boost in usefulness regardless of the objective and gets rid of one of the static abilities he doesn’t really need as an offensive-only class.
The engineer is now completely defensively oriented, still has his mines, turrets and the kevlar, but can’t turn his mates or himself into One Man Armies anymore. In addition, he has the caltrop grenades now, which add to the defensive character of that class.
Furthermore, the kevlar can now be countered by the weapon buff e. g. by another class.
Flame on.
:stroggbanana: