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So The Purge may exchange any flamer for a chemical flamer for free. This gains the advantage of gaining shred, but the disadvantage of 'gets hot'. Quite a big disadvantage when you have a '-' save. The other disadvatage is that, along with other advantages, in return you lose OS on troops. Still worth it in my eyes, the advantage more than outweighs the disadvantages.
You may also swap any Heavy Flamer for a chemical flamer. But there are no heavy flamer versions of the chemical flamer. So you are swapping a heavy flamer for a flamer with shred and 'gets hot'. This means you lose 1 strength, you lose 1 point of ap, you suffer from 'gets hot', (plus losing OS), and in return you get... shred. Yeh mathmatically this still means you are slightly more likely to get a wound on t3 or t4 with a 5+ or worse save, but anything with a 4+ save is far better with the heavy flamer, and you have to roll a 'gets hot' roll every shot and it's supposed to be a formation benefit for losing OS, not something slightly worse/on par.
So my question is - did they simply forget to put the heavy flamer version of chemical flamers in (as the only difference with the flamer and flak missile versions is the gaining of shred and 'gets hot', whilst the heavy flamer changes its whole profile)? Or do you think it deliberate?
Now Vraks has to be FWs sloppiest work in a long time. Half of the book is a literal copy-paste job from IA:13 without them even bothering to spend the time to correct the mistakes they made in that one in the first place. This lack of any obvious proof reading of the rules (twice), makes me suspicious of this being what they intended for the chemical version of the heavy flamers. The other thing that makes me suspicious is that heavy flamers are twice the price of flamers, so why would they give the exact same profile when 'upgraded'?

What are your thoughts?

The fact they left in the word 'may' means that it's optional. Having the option is always better than not having the option, because I can guarantee that someone somewhere would complain that their Heavy Flamer can't become a Chemical Flamer when a normal one could. I personally never would, but someone is going to want to do so for some reason.

Might be for vehicles actually. You don't get the choice of what sort of Flamer weapon is on a vehicle, and the rule isn't limited to Infantry. So, you might want that ability on a Chimera's front Flamer, and if it didn't have that option, you'd be unable to 'upgrade' it to the fluffy option of a Chemical Flamer.

Yeh makes sense that they would put it in there as an option for fluff reasons. Still strange that a heavy flamer has the exact same profile as a flamer when 'upgraded' though.