You skipped the point about Forum biases, which is a real thing.
According to the forum posters, the tank nerfs, for example, would mean the end of people playing tankers. Well, in all the pugging I’ve done since the patch dropped (both low and high level) I haven’t seen a noticeable difference in the number of tanks being played.
Similarly, Kinetic Melee is considered the worst melee set in the game per the forums, but I still see a fair number of KM toons in the wild across the level spectrum.