My brother has a beam rifle/dev blaster he is really taken with. I must admit I've never used devices, even back on live but the changes they made to it look like it's been brought in line with other secondaries.
Blasters can fairly easily soft cap ranged defenses and reach decent defense levels for S/L/E which can make you fairly survivable given how every secondary has some sort of sustain power, not to mention inspirations. Liberal use of Thunderstrike/Mako's Bite/Eradication/Cleaving Blow all provide good defense/E/N bonuses and the usual tough/weave/hover/CJ and stealth operative provide good slots for lotg and the resist +3% defense uniques.
The one thing to maybe consider is that AR/DP don't have access to an 'Aim' and devices lacks a true 'Build Up' power so that may be a compelling enough reason to go Beam Rifle. If you're okay with not having that you could slap the Gaussian's proc in Operative (maybe? I think?) Or run the +to-hit toggle from Leadership and have it fire off whenever it procs.
My blasters range from 32-45ish and are decently built so far and are absolute damage machines when Build Up/Aim are up. Opening with snipe also increases your range for some time letting you completely tear apart several foes before they can get to you. They are still vulnerable to being overwhelmes if your cooldowns are on cooldown, but with the attack/to-hit buffs and your nuke up you can do some serious 'arresting'.
My experience with Devices is extremely limited, and I'm sure there are some /Dev specific tricks you can do with the gun drone/trip mine/time bomb but I'm not the guy to ask.