Earlier this week I attempted to recreate a character concept from a different system into 2e, and it was going relatively well until I met a wall, the complete inability to focus on a ranged weapon as a Swashbuckler, I'm asking to be sure I'm not missing anything or if (outside of thrown knives) there is truly no way to make ranged weaponry work with the class as written.
The character in question is a Crossbowman (and yes, I am aware of the limitations of the weapon, but this isn't meant to be an optimized build) and originally a 5e Bard, a broke human son of a disgraced low-noble house that learned archery and debauchery alike before dropping from a respected military academy; in combat, his focus was in archery and buffing teammates/battlefield support, whoever I've never been a fan of the necessity of magic to realize that concept in 5e, so during the transition to Pathfinder I also decided to move away from the Bard chassis (which is usable with the Archer archetype, but once again, magic) into a class that could fit the Dex/Cha paradigm closer to what I had envisioned, and the Swashbuckler seemed like a perfect fit.
For the first few choices everything fell into place marvelously, the Wit style captured the charismatic combatant idea to a T, and by taking One for All at first level both the ability to aid allies (and generate panache doing it!) and be a competent sharpshooter were taken care of, except for the fact that Precise Strike specifies a melee weapon attack for the precision damage to be applicable, and the same limitation applies to finishers, the core damage enhancers of the class.
My question is, with many swashbuckling heroes such as Musketeers and Pirates being not only flashy and charming but also equally skilled with sword and firearm alike, why is there no option to accommodate ranged weapon use with the Swashbuckler? This is not coming from a build help perspective, as I believe the core concept can still be reasonably translated into PF2e with a Fighter/Rogue/Ranger/Bard with the relevant archetypes (Marshal for the first three and Archer on the Bard), but I believe there is a niche that could be filled by allowing the use of select ranged weaponry on the SB; maybe the use of high-damage finishers alongside the safety of ranged combat is the no-no in this situation? If this is the case I hope new finishers designed around the use of ranged weapons/firearms in GaG could solve this issue, even if a Class Archetype is necessary to solve the inability to use their only finisher at first level, as well as class features dependant on melee combat such as Opportune Riposte.