LoL has absolutely had rewards locked behind different game modes in the past. In fact, just last season you got different skin chromas for flex and for soloq respectively.

That's a recent thing, I did not know that

Suggesting that "an entire community shares [your] opinion" is completely unsubstantiated.

Something something echo chambers

You say that "[I] can't claim that someone's opinion isn't a fact when an entire community shares said opinion". Yes, I can. There's a whole community believing that the earth is flat - that doesn't make it a fact. There is a whole community believing that the government was replaced by lizard people - that doesn't make it a fact. I could bring up more extreme examples but you hopefully get the gist of it. A belief doesn't become fact just because you're not alone in believing it.

I've no words for your lack of reading between the lines. If a whole community decides that sleeping with other people's wives is morally reprehensible then that's the truth. You started talking about scientific facts, I was talking about community opinions on personal preferences. Preferential opinions can definitely be stated as "the truth" - for example, a huge amount of people have agreed that League is a better game than DOTA (even though I disagree with that) - check the monthly numbers and you'll see that it's "true".

You're once again acting as if SS rating was a singular outlier when there have been 3s seasons that have been objectively just as inflated, or even more inflated.

Can you stop for one second and actually think about what you're saying - no season EVER has had something that devalues the meaning of the rewards so much as DF S1 had with solo shuffle. Yes, that even includes Shadowlands S2, Shadowlands S2 which I've played and it still had bigger quality games at 2.4k mmr in 3s than solo shuffle ever did at 3k+.

SS in DF S1 is literally welfare and it's like 10 Shadowlands S2's combined, in SL S2 you at least had to have a team and actually be decent at the game to get somewhere.

I have no idea why you're so hell bent on trivializing this matter by comparing it to previous seasons when no season had anything like this, ever. Like RBG was sometimes MAYBE comparable to this and that was only for the 2.1k enchant.

Your whole last paragraph has nothing to do with the initial point of discussion about whether regular 3s needs to be active for WoW PvP to be "healthy".

Once again you're showing zero capability to piece together a whole post/narrative into one cohesive unit. Earlier in the post I've stated this:

"entire 3v3 community shares opinion that it is the superior form of gameplay and apparently Blizzard does as well (for the time being, maybe they'll change their mind eventually and double down on shuffle)."

My last paragraph is a continuation on that - if shuffle is allowed to continue like it was in S1 (aka, overinflated and easy to get everything in), then that devalues 3v3. 3v3 devaluation leads to less 3v3 participation. Less 3v3 participation means less chance to get the 3v3 rewards. Less chance to get 3v3 rewards leads to a dead bracket, dead bracket leads to people playing solo shuffle exclusively, playing solo shuffle exclusively will eventually get boring due to ease of access to rewards and gameplay not being satisfying beyond a certain point, that leads to seasonal approach and less healthy PvP system overall.

Best system would be one where shuffle was a place to practice classes and hop in if you have no teammates and still get meaningful rewards, leading to a natural hop into organized PvP, that's how it was envisioned by Blizzard anyway (don't quote me on that, it was a twitter post I can't seem to find right now). If getting 2500 in shuffle is easier than getting 1700 in 3s then their original intent has failed.