Combining combat skills

I've long had a problem with the ridiculous degree to which Shadowrun combat skills are partitioned. It seems kind of dumb that firing a sniper rifle and firing an assault rifle are different skills and that chopping someone with an axe is fundamentally different than smashing someone with a baseball club. Therefore I've been considering changing the firearms and close combat skill groups into skills and making the subskills (automatics, longarms, etc) into specializations as a house rule for all my games. Do you think this would unbalance the game?

Edit: I am running 5th edition