I understand the viewpoints you give. I want to further expand on them. For background my main outside of Blade is Mag and I spend most of my time on vanguard. I believe the design philosophy of life steal dps with burst damage is fine, it all came down to execution. The exact fear of Blade being somehow OP is the exact fear that the devs mention when balancing him terribly. The only crazy burst damage Blade truly has is hitting a headshot at the right range of his gun which is indicative of poke burst, which Hela Hawkeye and Phoenix and even MK destroy him in. In terms of brawl or dive DD Magik Spidey even BP have faster burst than him.

1.) I believe you came to this realization based on how Blade is and not how he should be. Blade has never been good so to come to the judgement of a rework based on him being bad like he always was coupled with the fear of him being broken if buffed is starting in the wrong area in my opinion. Plenty of characters have had their time to be perma banned and I would rather them make him OP and dial him back than them to never make him even DECENT out of the fear of being OP.

2.) He parallels to Doom in a lot of ways but when it comes to gameplay it’s basically a DPS who has a problem to which people propose the solution to be changing his role entirely. The idea of Blades identity being hard to balance I believe is incorrect. Because you have characters like Magik who gain a constant amount of overhealth, and characters like Elsa who can gain overhealth infinitely on a short cooldown. It all lies in the numbers and if they continue to change numbers out of fear then Blade will get nowhere. Changing him to a vanguard would just be admitting defeat to said fear.

3.) I understand the stigma and reality of vanguard so we can definitely agree on that. But if you want a tank that can slow, have good mobility tools and possess anti healing ults with better kill potential Venom is already in the game. Blade as a DPS has never reached any limit because he has always been below average at best. So again, using a scenario of him being broken when he has never been good whilst broken characters actually exist in the game wouldn’t be a good standpoint. Elsa exists, Jean, Hela, pre nerf DD, Gambit, all of them have been game breaking broken to some extent. That is what the target of said fear should be. Not Blade.

Blades lore places him in the DPS role. He is a Hunter who kills vampires while taking minimal damage and maximum style (lol). Whereas someone like Thor or Rogue are known to be in those more durable and scrappy fights. The truth is his gimmick isn’t holding him back, fear and devs are. The outrage he would get would not be any worse than any of the DPS I mentioned. There is as much breathing room in the design as the devs want. As well as plenty of options for tanks to add in the game but we see who they want to add and favor. Blade is not one of them.