I wouldn't call them alternate plays, I'd call them acts of desperation. The fact of the matter is that coldtech makes defensive play much too strong.
Who dares wins. I bet you wouldn't call the normandy landings an alternate play either. /s
What was that one quote? Something about timidity does more damage than audacity given the same amount of knowledge? Of course, if everyone agrees that blizzards are too hard to mount an offense during and decides to simple wait out the blizzard then you'd never know whether there was an effectove way to do so other than waiting it out.
Either way, it's not going to be re-implemented as long as nobody wants it. But I disagree that blizzards are as hopless as naysayers make it out to be. Yes, it probably requires fine tuning, but so did the rest of the game at the time blizzards were part of normal gameplay. And look how far the rest of the game has come.
I think it was unfortunate that blizzards were removed so early into the life cycle.