The problem with this is once this has been established, the Congress started being lazy and just throw the lawmaking to the bureaucrats, essentially saying "well. we make this agency and they will figure out the rules, we don't care, whatever". And this makes the law completely unaccessible to the regular citizen and the people being completely unable to influence which laws they are living by. While you can, with great effort, dislodge a bad congressman, there's practically no way for a regular citizen to affect anything within a bureaucratic regulatory agency and they are essentially in charge of lawmaking now. They can pass any law they want - and before SCOTUS intervention, Chevron ensured that you have no recourse at all against them, since the courts (by itself a hugely expensive and prohibitively complex process) will just tell you "the Congress passed the authority to the bureaucrats, so they can do whatever they like, we're not intervening". This is not a good balance of powers and not a good way to manage the affairs in the country.

> given that judges likely have even less knowledge of the subject than the ATF, probably worse and more inconsistent.

In the unicorn rainbow world where the regulatory agencies are omniscient saints only worrying about the common good, that may be an argument. In the real world, where the regulators are extremely politicized, extremely concerned with gaining more power and extremely happy to pass completely absurd and harmful regulations if it fits their particular agenda, it's not. And by now we all know this is the world we are living in.