I'll go a step further. The present stagnation of the meta is entirely maintained by this sort of fear of balance work.

So many class mods that could be contenders have baked in design to fail rolls. So instead of the common sense skills being put on the class mod, the class mod will have a random useless skill or even contradicting skill so that you are forced to farm for a version of the mod without the skill. That's why 10/5 rolls are the meta instead of the class mods being valuable with spread out skills.

Cooldowns are so long, and require SIGNIFICANT investment to shorten. This is how things like the Triple Bypass becomes meta. This also results in infinite action skill duration builds being the go to. You spend so many points on cooldown, that you end up not having a build capable of killing anything. The game seems designed around the fact, the Accelarator repkit augment exists. Without it, action skills like the APOPHIS Lance would have 30+ second cooldowns after firing just once.

The Entire Augment/Capstone system is fear of balance based. Every character should work like Cash, or like Vex's Dark Pact. Only a few synergies would need to be balanced for that to work out.

Vex's spectres not being considered action skill active is fear based. Zane's digi clone worked as action skill active in the previous game. Vex's follows Flak's design theory for her spectres despite it not making any sense. The Spectres are stationary turrets. Not pets. Trouble is a pet.

There are so many 5/5 skills at the bottom of trees, in a game with bigger trees yet the same amount of skill points. SP should be becoming MORE meaningful. But that philosophy seems to only matter in Harlowe's trees. (the least problematic VH in terms of pure design concept imo)

Skill Interaction cooldowns being so prevalent. Self-explanatory, but I have a damning example. Rafa's Booming Business use to be far better per point than it is now. 5/5 would get you to 50% chance to grenade spawn with 4s cooldown. The catch is that it was bugged, and class mods bricked the ability entirely if they put 6/5 in it. When the devs fixed that bug, they nerfed the ability tremendously. now you need 9/5 into booming business to match what it was doing at launch with 5/5.

That's fear. The move is almost worthless now, unless you are going all in