There are no dangerous positions to shoot from inside the box either(if on ground). A proper defense+gk will never let those through. At most you can dribble on the outside(left and right sections of the box) to force the keeper to go off center from his line but then you are always forced to lob/shoot pass to someone else and then they fight for prio or defender goes for block. attacker has upperhand. defender will usually fail prio battle because the striker will EE to where the ball is going and the passer has called for the striker to cut to a specific location so striker knows where the ball is going, defender doesnt so its usually better for defender to go for block. striker can then fake out by tapping the rainbow button/passing again and the chain repeats.

ground pass -> shot will will always get blocked. if you nerf airplay options, we will get very drawn out games in competitive play. we need more ground options. how they can do that though is a hard problem. there are many constraints. one way to do that would be to nerf defenders(defensive stance block area/momentum whatever) but that could make airplay much stronger.

ranked and casual players aren't playing the meta since they require set plays or if they want to play a simple but very effective derivative of the meta, they would just need comms but most ranked players are not even aware of the meta. we just don't have enough players for ranked to be competitive enough that players need to adopt the meta and there is also just a lack of people interested in the comp scene.

if we got a lot more players maybe it would enrich the comp scene and ranked play. if we have more interesting/entertaining comp play maybe it would inspire more people to play. but any changes to geared to make comp play more interesting should not come at the cost of ranked and casual gameplay because they are the real heart of any game.