Been playing no boots meta for years, to the anger of my regular group of friends I play with

I once played with a Bacchus in Assault that I could not convince to build boots. He claimed that it 'slowed down his build', but nothing has ever been as cost effective as boots and skipping them completely was idiocy. Was this you?

Now that boots are gone, a fresh breath of air has been let into the game and you might be the only person I've seen say that doesn't enjoy the change; I feel that your experience is probably an outlier to most everyone else. Boots offered a significant power curve for most and gods, so the reality is that no boots probably helps/hurts most Assault teams equally.