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Alright ... first, I want to say that the concept of revising the Rapid Reload feat is a marvelous idea to include other weapons that take longer to load than typical bows.
Now, that being said, I think that there's a tweak that could be made to the specific language. It's tiny, and it's pedantic, so please, bear with me.
Essentially, it's being revised because when originally written (even back in 3.5) the only thing in the world that took longer to reload was the crossbows. Now, when another fine idea like firearms came along, it needed a tweak. But, fact of the matter is - firearms were there from the beginning in the DMG, just tucked away in a little used section. At any rate ... no one ever thought of it, and so now ... a little tweak. .... and that's cool and everything, but, what if it happens again?
Basically, the whole place where this is coming from, is that there was a weapon back in 3.5 that was called an Elven Double Bow. ... two strings, second was a move action to load. Now every DM I have ever played with (in non-organized-play) allowed me to use Rapid Reload, even though it specified crossbows. But, with this new revision of the Rapid Reload feat, it made me get a little ebullient about the idea that maybe I had gotten it right, after all.
I think that it's perfectly written, but, I was wondering if it might not be a good idea to make the wording less weapon-specific. Note that a prerequisite is proficiency, describe how it lowers the reload time by one "step" ... but, where it says "one- or two-handed firearm" could it not just as easily read "... two-handed ranged weapon"? And keep the wording that says, "you may fire that weapon as many times in a full-attack action as you could attack if you were using a bow." Or, you know, something like that. It would allow DMs a little more leeway in their homegames, and make it clear that Rapid Reload can be for any weapon ... even the ones that the writers never knew would exist later on.
Just a thought to help out with the Playtest and the revision of the stuff. <two pennies click in the bottom of the jar>
It's definitely something I'd support - the more forward-compatible the wording of something is, the better.
+1
I can't see how this would be used negatively and it would remove the need for this to be changed further in the future, with any weapon that would react differently to rapid reload having that information in its wep description