While a lot of people seem to blame balance team for the problems game has, without acknowledging the fact that with rotten foundation layed by relic its really hard to build something solid.
Balance team over-all did a good job into bringing the game into more or less balanced state, but the path to it is very subjective.
As an example, we can at the whole situation with the TDs in the game. Are the TDs right now balanced? Yes they are balanced. But they ultimatly made game less fun and spammy (at least outside 1v1). Because the aproach of TD balance was strate-forward in other words giving them insane penetration, since they needed it in order to fight heavy tanks. But in proccess of doing so, TDs become supper effective against all vehicles. The same way TDs could have had lower ROF, but increased damage making them less deadly against mediums, but better against heavy tanks. In theory at least.
Other stuff balance team had fixed was pretty much shit stains from old relic design, which were objectively bad choses. I mean, its cool that ISU\CB\2 model sniper and so on were fixed, but I'm pretty sure it took longer to get those in Relic "scope" rather then finding the solution. Still its good to have them fixed non the less. But again we dont know how much times "scope" thing was just a convenient excuse and I am pretty sure it was used in that way at least ones during CoH2 life.
But again balance team are far from being saints themselfs and they are known to ignore even resonable feedback about their ideas. The most recent example is B4\ST changes, even before fist changes were made to mentioned units, majority is good players have said that it will be broken\OP but it was ignored, just to be nerfed later. And we have plenty of such examples like VSL, penals and so on. I mean sure, its good that it took less time for balance team to accept that their idea is not working (unlike relic back in the day), but yet it still takes more then a week to fix. And it doesnt really makes players happy that they will be forced to play god knows how long with VSL\Penal\Cons blobs, ST\B4 nukes, Osttroopen LMG hordes and so on, especially considering the outcome was predictable from the beggining.
Also the whole situation with "bandaids". When there is no easy solution to address the problem balance team rather nerf this thing into the oblivion for it never to be used again or be super lackluster.
Personally my own and single complain, is that balance team are kinda lacked "creative approach" and "out of the box" thinking about some problem solving. But again, we dont know what relic allowed to change or to add to the game, but at least for some problems which relic allowed balance team to adress much better solutions could have been found. Some of the units\abilities after such changes became merely "side options" being marginally better in something so specific that they are not even woth picking if they are not part of the meta.
I agree with your final point there although I am one that looks back at the 'problems' and 'shit stains' as you mentioned as part of Relic faction design. The normalization that the balance team has suggested and changed made the game overall more tasteless and predictable. All for the sake of better 1v1 games. Team games have suffered over the past 2 years, made more boring and predictable because of the suggested changes.
WFA faction design was that USF/OKW was missing X tool but did Y better. There was a flavour to them that made up for their vulnerabilities. Now over the years, the balance team has normalized everything so these two factions are just missing certain tools without doing anything else better.
I enjoyed the asymmetrical faction design more than I do the normalized factions. Perhaps I'm looking at the past through rose coloured lenses but back then, every faction had something powerful they could do. It didn't matter if E8s were strong because OKW had strong heavy panzers and cheap volk/shrek blobs to deal with them. Team games were a lot more fun back then too because there were a lot more usable units. Compared to now where we have many units that are only useable in 1v1s. These units don't get buffs they need to compete in team games which leads to less unit choices in team games. The balance team has essentially locked some units to 1v1 which I really don't like. Even then, these units aren't all that good in 1v1 (talking specifically about doctrinal Shermans).
Team games have changed a lot since it was 3-4 years ago. Before, 4x of a single faction used to be very strong since you were missing X tool but did something else stronger. So say a team of 4x USF would have very strong mainline infantry, good pack howie and thus a strong early game but would be vulnerable to snipers, have a weak ATG, and would not have rocket artillery. Now, 4x USF is similar to any other game with any other faction except they are vulnerable to snipers, no rocket artillery, weak ATG, and without the benefit of having more powerful mainline infantry or the strong pack howie. The normalization of factions has made it so that if you're missing a faction on your team, you become vulnerable as a result.
I think its important to understand while the balance team has good intentions, 1v1s is not all of Coh and simply balancing for it and leaving the leftovers for team games has ruined part of the game. Its a pipe dream to have a hyper balanced 1v1 game without ruining team games and that's exactly what they've done. Ruined team games chasing a pipe dream.
Players show up here on Coh2.org and in this thread complaining because they love this game. Not because its more fun to post about Coh2 than to play it. In all of my games that I play, the players that are still around, still playing are max prestige 3 players. They are staying around because they love this game.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Coh would be a lot better if there were separate balance patch notes for 1v1s and then team games. It would also be better if the hyper focused balance/normalization of factions was done in a mod so that the minority wanting hyper balanced 1v1s can download the mod and play their competitive games on the mod. Leaving patch notes to balance for team games for the majority of players.
There are more 2v2/3v3/4v4 games than there are 1v1 games and in the team games there are more players playing 2v2/3v3/4v4 games so it doesn't make sense to me to balance strictly for 1v1s and leaving the scraps for team games.
Relic Entertainment
