And here is why!

I have drawn this very accurate picture of a space marine standing beside a knight, a chaos knight specifically.

In lore knights are gigantic, 40 foot tall war machines capable of reducing entire fields of battle to dust, so powerful their pilots must undergo intense, life threatening tests of mind and body, their very souls tested against all those who came before them, lest they fall to temptation and use this near god like titanic machine for evil...

Anyways that tiny little 8 foot tall semi-super human beside himhas a better armour save and is more likely tp do damage to the knoght then the knight is to kill the marine, because games workshop doesn't understand how balance works. If I pay 400+ points for a model and thats 1/5th my army that model better be able to wipe the floor with 90% of everything, and a pissy little space marine worth 17 points shouldn't even be a blip on my radar.

I can't really adequately explain my anger over this without going deep into the rules, but in short a chaos knoght averages about 5-10 shots, and 3-9 attacks per turn depending on the knight, using a knight abominant as my main example it has 10 shots, 4 with 0 ap, and 6 with 1 ap, and 3 attacks with 2 ap (it also has a special rule that triples its hit rolls so it is functionally 9 attacks).

However that little space marine has a thing called armour of contempt, which reduces all ap by 1, so now my shots all have 0 ap, and my attacks have 1.

Now lets look at heavy incercessors, the "basic" space marine. 23 points each, meaning that for the same cost of my abominant they get 18 models. Each model has a heavy bolt rifle that shoots 1 shot or 2 in half range, with ap 1. That means they get up to 36 shots, and that doesn't account for unit upgrades. Without factoring in str vs toughness that means their little space boys can force up to 36 wounds (in shoot) while a knight can only force up to 10 (also not calculating total damage since marines only have 2 wounds and damage doesn't spill over, otherwise a knight COULD do 22, or if rolling all 6's, up to 40, but given the variance in dice we are excluding max rolls).

Basically, pissy little marines are stronger then the literal most powerful weapons ever created by mankind.

I have space marines.