Yeah that type of weapon is just insanely good. The upgrade to it is just as powerful, the only reason I switched over to the gamma ray is the way the magic healing armour set works.
Speaking of, I've finished hardmode now and have started the lunar phase (first pillar down) and am still finding magic to be overwhelmingly the best option by far. Nothing else even comes close. As an example, the gamma ray from the plague boss puts out 3k+ dps on a practice dummy, while the crossbow does like half of that, without healing. Melee is even worse, generally doing less than 1k with most of the weapon available, only hitting a little over 1k on a practice dummy with certain weapons in the perfect situation (landing all the projectile hits and the melee hits at once, impossible in a real boss fight.) Never mind that magic also gives access to things like magnet sphere and wrath of the ancients, which puts out nearly 2k on top of whatever else you're doing, or the crazy extra healing from the mana overloader, if you use that (I stopped because it seemed too powerful after brimstone tier weapons/armour.)
A good example of the disparity between where melee is and ought to be is the (upgraded) brimlash vs the solar eruption. They both require solar fragments, but the brimlash does like one third the damage, at one tenth the range, is far more difficult to land hits with and can't fire through walls. It's a huge difference. You could literally quadruple the damage on the brimlash and I still wouldn't ever use it over the solar eruption. Hell, I wouldn't even use it over the possessed hatchet from the golem. At least that thing might actually hit stuff without getting me killed in the process.