Eh, the T9s are skippable since you don't need the "Oh Poopie" button with enough IOs. IOs don't give you a nuke.
But I think there's also door number three here that doesn't get discussed:
The game is stuck in an outdated gameplay loop. Long story short, with the only progression being vertical progression and story and progression firmly disconnected, progression has become the be-all and end-all. We've done the story enough times, and we've been in the Skinner box long enough to know how to game the green light. Yeah, yeah, that's not how you might play, but you're really in the minority here.
This was a problem that other games were working on even before shutdown. Guild Wars 2 threw vertical progression the window and then embraced. Final Fantasy XIV locked progression to story. Paragon never really had a chance to solve this issue, instead they were still playing follow the leader with incarnate raids at shutdown. Now our devs are picking up the pieces and having to do so without setting fire to their player base. How do you make story and progression more rewarding? Kallisti is a step in a direction but without any real reward beyond story completion and badging, and as long as time-to-rewards are behind Peregrine and AE, I'm not sure about its longevity. (See: Dark Astoria) Players still want their fast progression and the fastest way remains being carried through map clears by a brute and/or tanker.
All the nerfs and buffs to brutes and tankers will never solve the problem that anything that doesn't make green light faster is trash. The real solution is that vertical progression needs to be taken to the woodshed and some manner of horizontal progression added. But I'm not sure how you can accomplish that with this being a volunteer fan project. Heck, I'm not sure even where to begin on what manner of horizontal progression to add. π