Absolutely required for any KOTOR run in my opinion. The average blaster is absolute trash even compared to a bog standard shortsword. The fact that this mod takes the changes that Obsidian made in KOTOR 2 and adds them to KOTOR 1 makes blasters somewhat more palatable in the beginning, which is fantastic for characters like Carth and Mission, who are pretty much perfectly geared for blasters.
This mod very much improves the capabilities of your companions, for example, HK-47, who is blaster dependent. This certainly helps balance things out, but it does increase difficulty, as your opponenets will also be utilizing these weapons. Some of the Sith troopers use a special NPC gun that is relatively weak, which is not touched by this mod creating some relative imbalance, but with any difficulty mod installed, or set on higher difficulty this problem is nullified. Overall brought back some of the fun of blasting things in post Dantooine gameplay.