Well let's see. Deformity aside, you get extra noise, extra hand encumbrance, the leaky bionic causes you to get sick (as in, poisoned: it reduces your health - not HP - roughly once in 500 turns), and the visual disruptor we already covered. The advantages are solely self-supporting - metabolics and power storage only allow you to use the bionics at all, the scent vision is hardly frequently useful, and for all the combat usefulness of claws you can get much the same with a good sword, and it won't cost you energy to activate and deactivate every time you want your hands free. The only really good advantage is the digestion bionic, and I am not entirely sure the problems for long-term and even short-term survival presented by all the faulty hardware in your body are outweighed by it.
Huh, I've never seen any adverse effects from the leaky bionic. Maybe it's less visible on high-strength characters. In any case, it must be a minuscle effect.
The thing with the claws is, you have them from the get-go, while by the time you can find a sword, you will have needed other ways of dealing with zombies.
Additionally, unarmed attacks are super fast and easy to empower with martial arts from the dojos.
The claws take me from the day one town clearing to amigara horrors slaughtering. The only reasons not to use them is when fighting shockers and turrets/robots, so the reloading handicap hardly matters.
I mean, I don't know how it's even contentious. Pick the profession and go fight some zombies. It's so easy it feels exploity. I don't ever die with it, unless I'm terribly unlucky or stupid(like jumping into a rift, or shooting myself with my car's fusion gun).