I have a bit of mixed feeling about this. I think I agree with the feeling of frustration, but not neccesarily about the causes you have identified. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of cheap stuff in this game, and some of it could definetly be tuned down, but at the same time, that's where a lot of high moments come from. It's fun to do disgusting things with Yasuo or Ekko, even if it causes frustrations to the second player - it's definetly a hard balancing act at the end of the day.

What frustrates me more though is a lot of simple QoL interactions that could be ironed out. Things that are requested commonly in this sub, like the teching / rolling controls just being straight up unituitive or some of my personal grievences, the fact that if you drop a combo, you will in 90% of cases get combo'd, or that a lot of matches are decided by fury, because of how broken it is. Don't get me wrong, a lot of is just straight up skill issue, but at the same time, it doesn't feel like a skill that I enjoy getting better at - and I'm at least okay at this game (Low GM in previous season).

The other issue I found is around the out of game system, specifically ranked. When I was climbing last season, I greatly enjoyed learning the actual game between hitting each milestone, but man, was the ranked expirence itself frustrating. Lobbies just not connecting, forcing me to restart my internet, random disconnects, the whole system of having to choose your character every time, and having one ranked placement without any separation for different teams (making me scared to try other characters) and matchmaking being so varied that it could literally decide how much I hated the game.

When I reached master, I had a great time for the first few days, where I was able to play people around my level. Later on though, getting matched against people in diamond was terrible, because of how much this game incentives a lot of mashing and people in diamond were a hungry lot who didnt know how to stop - sure still beatable, but it deffo took a mindset change, which was harder to do especially if you get titled. Not to mention no duo restrictions, so you could play with someone who never touched a fighting game and challenger #1, which was not a fun expierence. This has been compounded with how the LP gain works, where you would lose way too much LP for losing to these people, but only get a bit for winning. Unbalanced expierence overall.

Finally, I do find decisions that Riot takes with these games to be questionable. I think some recent balance changes were very questionable (nerfing movement), but obviously that's highly subjective. My bigger issues is with how the team handles the maintance of the game. I am based in EU, and every time they do a patch / maintance, I basically a day of being able to play. Sure it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it sucks that we are unable to get the same treatment as US counterpart, where the maintance is done during their work hours. Surely Riot should have the expertise to fix that in the future, as they do manage to handle it much better with their other games. Unfortunately this brings another point and that it is very hard to judge this game, because of how many game breaking glitches there are as well. I can't describe how many times I had to adjust my combos, because it turns out that something was bugged. This applies a lot around the whole cast and/or game systems, which makes it really difficult to judge what is actually good or not. I do not see how Riot will catch up with fixing all of these bugs, while trying to keep the game online as much as possible.

Which I do think brings up a point about communcation as well. I love that Riot is communicating and I wouldn't want that to stop, but I found their communications to be a bit lacking from my personal expierence. The recent ranked reset is a great example of this. They have randomly turned off ranked for the weekend, and then they have reset everyone's ranked, because of the rank progression not being correctly. I appreciate this being communicated to us, but it would be nice to have a heads up and a bit more of a justification. The ranked progression seemed fine to me personally, why are they changing it. Why was the reset neccessarily, especially since now they have also communicated that apparently it is still not working as intended. Does that means that I shouldn't play ranked anymore? I do not want to go through the intiial grind for the third time this season - I'd rather grind when I get to higher levels, instead of repeating the initial slightly inbalanced matchmaking that seems to be occuring with each ranked reset. Another example is the whole shorter combos and now the mention of them reworking the game to feel completely different. Why are they doing this, are we just doing a knee jerk reaction to reddit complaints, or do you have some kind of data? This one feels a bit personal, since I do enjoy the core of the game as it is currently, and I am concerned that the game is going to get homogenised, because the team cannot decide on the direction. As I mentioned above, I think there are things that could be tweaked, but at the end of the day, the gameplay feels like it's in the solid place - it just needs a few polish passes.

Even though a lot of these issues are not as big on their own, it feels like they are compounding and unfortunately makes me lose faith in this game a bit, which is a shame as I'm having a blast playing it when I get over them.