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[Numbshot]

In my building of mechs, and my preference Blood Asp, I've found that when a mech has hardpoints which are clearly mounted on top of the ST and not within it, the STs takes disproportionate damage.
By this I mean, damage which spreads, be it; missiles, LBX, the random damage spread from aiming at range, or aiming randomly, the trend is the same - mech takes damage, but ST is far more often in a worse position.
Which feeds a loop, ST looks the most damage, thus it will be targeted more, thus the mechs durability goes down simply because its easier to destroy its ST.

It extends beyond probability and damage spread, say I want to torso twist to try to make my arm take most the damage? Its now a far greater risk to do that, simply because I may have just given my enemy a large, clear target for my ST. Which commonly ends in the loss the arm anyway, because the ST was destroyed if one were to do that, and effectively results in a tactic limitation overall.

So, treat shoulder mounts as a separate destructible component, be it an entirely different component (taking critical slots from the ST or a dynamic sharing mechanism) or a pseudo layer above armour and structure, where damage to the mount doesn't exactly carry over to the ST, but ST damage carries over to the mount, with the mount existing on a ST fixed structure slot, so that critical damage the mount takes goes to the weapons and that structure slot, almost like a C.A.S.E. within the ST.

In all, as much as I can point at what I believe are gameplay issues due to the silhouette, hitboxes and damage probability of shoulder mounts, it just feels wrong that a mech can have its ST destroyed because it effectively lost its 3rd or 4th arm rather than damage taken to the ST more closely.

[Ghoja]

I agree with you to some extent, not sure about treating it as a seperate component or not, but I do tend to stray away from using those shoulder mounts that increase profile size. The other option would be to make the shoulder mounts permanently there, used or not, and give that location an armor/structure quirk.