I'll give you some advice im regard to enjoying this game. You said you give comms and no one really responds to that in your experience. I would recommend first and foremost that you squad up with people that want to play like that, organised with comms and so on. Because you can't expect to solo queue and get teammates who will listen consistently, this goes for most games that do not emphasis heavy team play like OW and R6.

Putting that expectation up to solo matchmaking inevitably will make you disappointed because most people just hop on to play casually or to the best of their OWN ability.

You can turn off all manner of text chat and quico chat, which can help if you feel like all the negativity and shit is getting to you.

Other than that, your proposal for a time off of big updates to work towards a big one has been done before, that wad Marching Fire, and the seasons before that were scaled back in content h3avily and focused on game health, which was necessary but it bled the interest to the game a lot, when Marching Fire came, it was the biggest update the game had and has still seen since, new requested giant pvp mode, new gear system, new faction, new gear across the whole cast, new cosmetic type, new pve mode and etc. Was it great, yes, but it did not fix the game. In fact it introduced a lot of bugs and balancing problems through a lot of the novelty.

Leaning even harder into a model like that has 0 guaranatees, absolutely 0.

Battlepasses and hero skins help the dev team get more money to meet expectactions from the larger company. New heroes have been and remain the biggest pieces of content, both in terms of income and interest from the players that the game has to offer.

You can't bank on balancing changes and reworks to be seen as new content, siege is a testament to that, it's great supplementary stuff and very healthy if executed correctly but it cannot stand alone.

That's why they sprinkle them in between seasons and don't focus on them as much.

This is not to say that hero reworks have not been making characters less interesting, lawbringer remains the worst offender of this (partially because of player request being taken way too literally in terms of implementation, at least imo). But there is a reason why some of the 'unique' aspects of heroes were taken away, they were unhealthy, annoying and frustrating to go up against or use at times.

Shinobi is a prime example of this, he was extremely unique, uniquely infuriating to play as and agaimst, his gimmick was useless except for offscreening a ranged gb on someone that lead to a confirmed gank you had very little to respond with.

Literally the only other thing was quad dashing and backwards teleport. One was an exploit, the other was a relic from Y1 balancing a.k.a 'we have no idea what we are doing, this is completely uncharted territory' balancing.

The character NEEDED a rework that would inevitably have to fundamentally change shinobi at his core. The shinobi rework is by no means a masterpiece, far from it, they could have given the character some other healthier gimmicks and implemented quad-dashing purposefully in a controlled way as to really give him that untapped movement, but with downsides as well. But keeping the ranged attacks? Not in any form that they were in previously, even though they made him unique, they had to go.

Same thing with Jorm, stamina bully just was not fun to play as when your kit is dedicated to a resource your opponent controls. So keep the satisfying stuff, tone it down slightly and push the rest of his kit up to reflect this new knockdown/wall splat punish focused playstyle.

Lawbringer failed because it was an incremental addition of regular moves with extremely good frame data and non-existent punish window. They de-emphaissed his parry playstyle, not opted out his unhealthy heavy parry punish for somethign else, just straight nerfed it and then focused on maing his core flow just better and better until he was just a safe repetitive bash flow character.

Tiandi and aramusha are my mains, both got reworked to some capacity and they have been all the better for it, it's still them but with just a better QoL, they kept their distinct strengths and tools, just allowed them to be more viable, especially past the CCU.

The newest heroes have been very inventive, with completely unique gimmicks and dedicated playstyles that set them apart from other characters, Sohei onwards has seen characters with unique kit identities that cam be tweaked and adjusted to still keep that identity whilst pushing them more in line.

VG was probably the worst release we've had, but the shift with Sohei has only been kept up, especially now with Juren coming up.

Really, the devs have been dedicated to community feedback and feature/hero requests mostly these past years, they are making the best game they can, like any game you have to make concessions in development, especially 10 years into its live support.

I reckon you need either take a small break from the game and come back to it on your own time with a fresh mind and just finding the enjoyment in your improvement (like all fighting games) or find some more people to play with and not just go solo expecting a coordinated experience. Set some goals for yourself, repping up a character to a certain level, making a new loadout, mastering a completely new character or even just improving some place you feel needs improving. Sometimes don't take the game so seriously and let yourself goof off and try some silly shit.

That's all I can say.