Better is often subjective. I think rather than creating new weapons designed to replace the old ones by virtue of being clearly better they're trying to offer new things which complement our old loadouts.
I'll explain. No vendor is currently selling high impact sniper rifles. But honestly, we already have plenty of those (IB, BH, Spear, LDR et al). The new snipers are generally speaking lower impact but fire way more quickly. This won't be better in all scenarios but is definitely a welcome addition to the stable because in certain situations they can be more appealing.
In terms of endgame drops (PoE, ToO), they both have better Pulse Rifles than the VoG/CE variety. Scouts: VoC is great, so is the Fang, so is The Scholar - another welcome addition. For the first time, we're getting good Auto Riles in the endgame (I still feel they're bound to be re-buffed eventually, their current state is impossible).
I don't know, I guess it's a mixed bag. Some stuff is better, some stuff is worse, but there's a lot of stuff
I think the idea was to offer stuff to fill in the little niches in our loadouts instead of just replacing them altogether. And while I'd have loved some new ultimate loot that eclipsed the old stuff, I like the idea of respecting old tiers and just offering variety with other stuff which is different instead of better outright. And I think it worked! I wouldn't say The Scholar is better than VoC, but I wouldn't say it's worse either. Both are def. worth owning for instance. The fact that they are letting us ascend everything sort of convinces me this is the case. They want our new and old stuff to be normalized in terms of base stats (everything can go to cap) and just be differentiated by your preferred play styles.