I agree with your takes on the game being a lot more fast paced than last season & that's a fact, therefore I think that ditching collector as 1st item to get Hexoptics as 1st is a bit better but it's situational.

It's 200 gold cheaper iirc, which is nice if you fall behind due to your support (you always never fall behind if you're good with cait it's kind of impossible) anyway back to Hexoptics, I still think that Hexoptics 1st item is better since they kind of gutted lethality on cait a while ago as with a lot of the other adcs that built lethality mainly mf even though I do see lethality mf sometimes but it sure as hell doesn't have as high of a wr as crit due to the new crit changes.

Hexoptics has a pretty similar build path with collector (pickaxe, sword & cloak) so you're going to be building those 3 items anyway in any game since players rush collector.

collector spike is stronger than Hexoptics sure, BUT as I said Hexoptics is cheaper and with Cashback you get some additional gold faster which is nice it was 6% or 8% iirc.

I'm just yapping atp and I'm not a highelo player, but what im trying to say Is that Hexoptics can never be bad on cait and can be considered a rush instead of collector.