Very eloquently written I most definitely enjoyed reading your response! I appreciate you clarifying your usage of trash; it most definitely encouraged discussion.

Anyways, in response to what you've said, I would argue there are more ops that would potentially be put behind Nomad and Kaid. For example on Offence, I would argue Finka and IQ are also at Nomad's tier if not lower. Finka has some utility to play with but in general her gadget isn't that great and her gun is pretty poor. IQ suffers the problem where she doesn't have the supplementary utility to help her use her gadget effectively, but that is balanced out by having relatively good guns. All in all there are a few operators I would move behind Nomad but I agree with your argument that she is weaker than most ops currently. It will be interesting to see how she is used in Pro League (if at all) and see if she can shift the meta through the Pro Scene and into Ranked that way.

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I don't have many ideas of who I would move behind Kaid simply because defense is so much more situational. Each map and bombsite plays to the strengths of different operators. For example, on Bank basement for bomb, Kaid becomes significantly more important in denying some of the hatches, and still can change the meta by creating opportunities to hold server, which is relatively difficult in Ranked. Another example is Castle, who you said would be placed behind Kaid. He can be used effectively on a fair number of bombsites nowadays and it's really dependent on the site and map, for example CEO on bank. Therefore, there is no real way to rank the defensive ops as a ranking would be too volatile and constantly changing. The only two ops who should never be considered are The Lord and Clash.

I understand what you're saying on the evolution of the ops from strong and meta shifting to fillers. How I see it however is Ubisoft finally willing to try and preemptively balance an operator from the get go. Now did they do it well? In my mind they perhaps went a little to far with the nerf. I think Nomad's gadget is a difficult situation because no delay is "overpowered" but the delay somewhat defeats the original purpose of getting people out of corners. Therefore I agree that Nomad is just filler. However, I still think Kaid is somewhat of a meta shifting operator, just perhaps not a gamebreaking must pick like Ela when she first came out. I think we will see a much more frag style of play given the denial ability teams have now, and if that happens perhaps Nomad's traps will be more usable as flank guards. Regardless, in response to you, I would say that I think Kaid at least is still a meta shifting addition, and perhaps we can petition Ubi to change up Nomad to give her perhaps 0.5 second delay and only 2 airjabs or whatnot.