Archery in this game kind of sucks.

[Ulzgoroth]

Nobody else going to call out that unless everybody else is packing cinematic/super powers, as described the GM just blatantly erased the range that the archer needed to even remotely justify their specialty? I mean, 30 yards of clear ground isn't really enough to give a non-cinematic archer great results, but it's more than one round. (Unless you meant one round after you spent a round drawing your bow and a round aiming and a round shooting. 4 rounds is probably enough time for people charging at each other to close 30 yards in GURPS.

That is, to a significant degree the problem you're having isn't with GURPS, it's with your table having zero interest letting you use archery.

Now that said, it's quite likely you don't in fact want to play non-cinematic archery in GURPS. Because when you're doing it right, the 'melee guys' aren't in melee while you do it. They're standing around watching you plant arrows in out-of-reach enemies. Or preferably, they're shooting their own missile weapons alongside you, but gamers are often conditioned to think of melee and missile combat as separate roles.

If a GM wants to enable archery and melee happening simultaneously, making sense, and not using cinematic archer abilities, there probably needs to be hard-to-reach ranged-attacking enemies that the melee types will appreciate the archer removing.