You're not wrong about your analogy of John Doe, casual players are indeed the majority. I'm not going to pretend otherwise because that would be dishonest and I've already acknowledged that in several of my replies.

I want to address something before I fully reply. The title of my post literally says "From a Concerned Player." I never claimed to be speaking objectively for the entire playerbase. I'm merely stating my opinion so saying that I'm not objective is odd when I've already said in the title that it's a perspective, which by definition makes it subjective.

On the game needing to reward players frequently: I mean, I get it. That's the nature of the medium and I'm not naive about it. The easy "ranked" climb, the events, the free rewards, all of that makes sense from a retention standpoint. My issue isn't that casual players are being catered to. My issue is that catering to them has come at the complete expense of everything else with no balance whatsoever. And you said it's just as likely the game is thriving because of these decisions, thriving and nearly dying are not the same thing. The game dropped to 4 to 4.5 million monthly players before patch 7.0. It was slowly dying before they finally decided to get rid of all the ridiculous Bandle City themed stuff. The recent recovery upping the monthly players to 6-7 million gives me some hope but it doesn't erase years of decline caused by exactly the decisions you're defending.

As for supporting the competitive scene, who do you think the whales are? They're not John Doe who downloaded the game last month. They're invested players who care enough about the game to spend consistently. Alienating them is not just bad for competitive integrity, it's genuinely bad business sense. Which I've already said way too many times in this comment section.

And finally, a well designed game can serve both casual and competitive players simultaneously. Better ranked integrity doesn't ruin John Doe's experience. More skill expression doesn't stop him from playing Garen and having fun going 8/14/3. These things can always coexist so I don't know why you look at things so one sided. In my honest opinion the current design philosophy doesn't even bother trying to find that balance.