((I think everyone in the Gundams universe who makes it to design staff is at least somewhat high.))
((I mean, fuck, all this technology and they decide to make humanoid figures? And not ones that shoot lasers from their eyes? Good goddamn man. You could think they would at least make a mobile fortress, possibly one that floats))
((Lordy, but if you want mobile fortresses, that's what mobile armors seem to turn into.
Apsaras (which I love because they solved the problem of "needs more power" literally by throwing power plants at the problem until it went away),
Zeong (which was never even finished - what you see there is only half of it), and the ever-silly
Big Zam (fun fact - this thing was absolutely devastating in the canon, but apparently in the fighting games, it suffers from one crippling and blatantly-obvious weakness in that the player can literally walk under it and thereby get out of its weapons' firing arcs, then pump physical shots into it until the cows come home) come immediately to mind. The reason we rarely see eye-lasers is because the eye(s) is/are typically where the sensors are housed, instead of, you know, in the torso or something a bit more "center-of-mass". It's funny, though, because in a more realistic setting with the one big lie of Minovsky particles, the smaller mobile armors, fighters, and tanks are still what you'd prefer to pilot instead of humaniforms, precisely as you say. Lower profile, more efficient movement, better armor, and so forth. Same reason we use MBTs instead of Tsar Tanks.))