I tried the new JT and hated it. It's a clone of the Ele while being stuck in a bad doctrine.
Breakthrough doctrine bad in the new patch? Are you legitimately trolling?
It's a clone of the Ele
No it's not. It has actual comparable mobility now while still having 50 more armor and 80 more hitpoints. Especially the superior armor can still make a huge difference vs tank destroyers compared to an Elefant.
Oh and the engine upgrade got reworked in case you didnt notice it (wasnt in the patch notes). It gives the JT a noticable amount of extra speed if out of combat now. The old upgrade did almost nothing and the JT still moved like a brick, but now they buffed its base rotation and acceleration. And that was the main problem of the old trash JT. Once it finished reacting to an enemy attack on another part of the map, that attack was already over.
Vs what targets did you use the barrage ability? Mobile inf squads? The tests vs MGs and AT guns seemed perfectly fine to me.
Are you sure that the JT suffers from a 0.5 accuracy penalty on most of its shots or are you just assuming that?