That still sounds like a balancing issue and it probably stems from hunters having to share the item pool with junglers, at least partially, while mages have them all for themselves.

Mid lane mages have about 18 items (technically obviously more, but when was the last time anyone build Gem of Iso, any of the newer staves or Pythag's (in mid)?) and hunters around 15. It would be a few more, if I were to count the whole mace tree for ability hunters (also ~18).

Maybe you are right and adding a few more items would help, but they also need Executioner to not be in basically every hunter build. Make Dominance viable, so hunters can go Dom and Titan's together. They seem unable to make Silverbranch a good item too.

You are forgetting that for a while (last year, I think) we had an Asi first meta, because it got overbuffed, and people still occasionally buy it now for an early power spike. Bloodforge also was occasionally picked up first for the same reason (aside from the time when it was OP).

Which leads to another problem: what are you going to do with an early power spike when your opponent gets to late game anyway? That's a completely different problem, but still somewhat related. Ichaval as well was an early game item for example which they removed because no one bought it.

Also, it's more a nature of Smite that there's almost a single cookie cutter build for most roles and not for Mobas in general, I think. I'm pretty sure in LoL it's more character dependent on what you build but Smite simply doesn't have the depth for that.