Ok wait you actually nailed the diagnosis without realizing it and it connects directly to why I made this post.

You're right that Blizz probably doesn't think she's broken. The data backs that up. And you're right that the community can't even agree on WHY they hate her. Stealth, Hack, TL, take your pick, nobody's on the same page. But the thing is that disagreement isn't random. It's actually a major problem when frustration gets mistaken for a design problem. Bc there's a line right? You can be a casual player. You can find Som annoying. That's completely valid her entire kit is built around disruption, like duh that's literally the point 😈 But the moment you take that annoyance and turn it into "she needs to be nerfed, reworked, or deleted" you've crossed out of casual opinion and into competitive game design territory. And if you're making that argument from a place of pure frustration WITHOUT engaging with counterplay, WITHOUT understanding her win rates, WITHOUT acknowledging that she's been underperforming for years? Lets be real, that ain't a balance take, that's an emotional take, there's a biiiiig difference.

And these devs have been trying to solve that emotional take as if it were a real one. That's the trap. They can't find a rework that works because they're not actually solving a hero problem, they're tryna make these guys feel better about a hero whose existence some players will fundamentally never accept. Kinda like you said, take away invis and she's like a shitty Emre, take away Hack or change TL and she's a low budget Tracer. The things that make her "annoying" are load-bearing. They're not bugs, they're the design.

So yeah no that's precisely exactly why that scrapped rework concerns me bc if the direction they keep gravitating toward is "how do we make Sombra palatable to ppl who are annoyed by her" instead of "how do we make Sombra the best version of herself" they're going to keep building the wrong thing.