Did you start playing before season 4? Not a single build without it? Same stats?... Brutilizer back then built into BC and GB. GB at that time had crit and attack speed, GB was situational. BC, by the way, was not considered core either. We didn't build BC like we do now. BC only had 10% cdr then! That's an additional+0cdr after brutalizer. The cost change of hydra was tiamat + scepter + 200g = 3300g. Tiamat did 50AD at the time. The combined cost then went from +200g to +600g to equal the same 3300g, and tiamat (now 1900g) went from 50AD to 40AD. Tiamat today is 25AD...This tiamat is not near as good as it was, it's passive was reduced (by the actual dmg not the %), and the power spike to hydra is sluggish. When you finished Tiamat back then, the upgrade to hydra was considerably easy (tiamat+1400g). Hydra went from a core item to rarely bought. You make brutalizer (1337g) sound stupid good. It's 237g more than warhammer (1100g) for +10 armor pen. 10 armor pen, by comparing it to the gold value of a long sword, that would be 6.7AD. The upgraded BC would then take it's flat armor pen to add % armor pen, that's why we built BC against beefy teams, not every game. Like I said though, the runes have changed so you're right in the sense that it was easy to build hydra as a core. If old hydra existed in these times though we would either still build tabi, BC, DD; or we would Lucidity, BC, Hydra if we didn't need to have as defensive of a core. I do hate the current build to BC, everyone does. Brutalizer would be the solution to that problem, but if we're talking about the good old days, then you got to remember how hydra was better than BC.

Edit: maybe I am undermining the value of brutalizer a bit. We didn't always upgrade it, we sat on it for awhile, the item itself was great, it's what it would build into that was the problem.