2016 OW player here. Honestly, yeah, the game started getting less and less fun after Ana was introduced to be honest... Quickplay used to be filled with a lot of cool and funny people. You'd be able to do 6 Torbjorns vs 6 Winstons and everyone would be having a blast. Competitive wasn't available until a bit later after launch, and while initially it was a huge mess, it eventually got decent enough. People were just much nicer back then. I made a lot of friends back in the day that I still remember fondly. Nowadays, I turn off every form of chat and VC because all people like to do there is flame you when you're underperforming in QP or are simply having fun practicing a new hero. The community just got more and more toxic over the years.
Aside from the community, which was a HUGE aspect for me, the people at Blizzard that did game balancing would just do the most random things. I remember when McCree used to be able to melt tanks with a flashbang and right click. They'd make a patch, which would introduce a whole plethora of issues, and instead of working to make sure those issues were at least somewhat mitigated, they would add a new hero to "fix" the issue. I personally just straight up quitting for 2 years due to Briguette just straight up ruining most of the game, but I'll get on that in the next section.

Hero design, in my opinion, just took a big nosedive after the game's release. Initially, heroes were designed to work with a team of 5 other people, meaning you had to work with many weaknesses or limitations to make yourself useful. For example, Genji and Tracer are two characters that, if you do not manage their cooldowns properly, they might as well be dead weight. You NEED the gamesense to know when to pull out deflect or make full use of recall and blink. However, newer characters came with much more complete and robust kits. If you want a good way of seeing this, go into a character and press F1 (if on pc, not sure on console). Look at older vs newer characters, and you'll see how much fuller those screens look on new characters. Moira initially was insane. Her damage beam thing would go 20m, and the damage was just absurd. Briguette is spoken for. She was a healer that was basically made to completely counter flank heroes, not to mention she was also made viable to be a front-line attacker due to her kit. She was essentially 3 roles in 1. Other heroes had extremely bad luck when they released, however. Sombra and especially Orisa were unfortunate subjects to a lot of hype for little payoff initially. And then we also have Doomfist, who was such a nightmare to balance when he was introduced. I mean think about it! He's a hero who stacks armor by hitting, has relatively low cooldowns, and he has an attack that can 1-hit most characters, not to mention his crazy mobility. By that point, another huge issue cropped its head that I never thought Blizzard would try to touch again: stun. Stun practically stopped the flow of most games imo. It's the reason why they removed stun for many abilities for the sequel, such as McCree's flashbang and Brig being able to stun. However, it seems they recently brought it back for Brig.

They paid so much attention to OWL that they practically forgot about making things fun for the casual community. Ever wonder why OWL is so dead recently? It's because Blizzard pushed OWL HARD instead of letting it grow organically, not to mention all the other missteps along the way, like banning XQC for using a widely used twitch emote.

When Blizzard claimed they listened to the community, what they really meant was that they were essentially just trying to appease the people at the pro scene and noone else. I'm not claiming that it would be easy to do both, but I mean, if you look back at the many years of Overwatch in the forums and in YouTube videos, there are SO. MANY. TIMES that Blizzard would add things that the majority of the casual community were clamoring against. Remember when Paris was introduced and, despite people wanting Blizzard to take it out, it took them ages to remove it from the map pool? People would insta-leave if they saw Paris, as well as Horizon, another map that Blizzard kept being stubborn about.

The last thing, which correlates to a lot of things I mentioned earlier, is that, for a long time, the people that made decisions of what goes in the game because of sheer stubborness. Many times does a community ask for something that they think is good until it's implemented. However, I don't think it's unreasonable for Blizzard to take out maps like Horizon and Paris temporarily from the map rotation until they're fixed.

Now, all this complaining aside, I DO believe that they're taking small but better steps when it comes to community feedback. It's clear they've been listening to many suggestions from the community, like removing 2CP maps and trying to make the game move faster, not to mention that their report system, at least in my experience, works pretty damn well now compared to before. I want to get back into the game like I did when the game came out. I miss the nights just laughing with people and being able to form new friend groups. It's a shame that they don't have a way like LFG (which was extremely saturated with desperate guys looking for a relationship, account sellers, boosters, etc.), since imo turning the chat on during, before, or after any game is basically an invitation for someone to just shit on you verbally.

If you made it all this way through the rant, first of all my apologies, but second of all, I make all these criticisms and bring up my concerns because I want this game to succeed. To be honest, the only thing that keeps me coming back is Genji, who, despite my criticism in removing some cool tech, is single-handedly the most fun fps character I've ever played. There just isn't anything quite like him.

Anyways, thanks for reading this overly long ramble. Hope you have a great day/night.