Profile of Superhet

As the mortar pit is only good on certain maps and stuff.

It's bad on every map. It has the same weaknesses, but each map style accentuates some of them.

A linear map like Road to Kharkov means scouting its construction and anticipating its placement will be easier, while indirect fire can be concentrated without inconvenience alone or with a forward HQ/reinforce halftrack to destroy it. A wide map like Moscow Outskirts means it can't keep up support of your forces properly and will be vulnerable to a direct attack if you don't blob around it thus tying your units down. A balanced map merely makes both apply equally rather than accentuating one.

The mortar pit is something you build not because you want to but because you have no other choice. And the advanced emplacement doctrine probably makes people assume it's better than it actually is.

Hold on a second. You can't ignore the fact that it does not need reinforcement costs and has a ridiculous health pool with a laser forcefield around it. To say it is the least cost efficient for dps is taking a fifth of the whole story. Plus it has two mortars inside and outranges other mortars also. Of all the justifications I cannot believe anyone would say it is weak for the money.

1. Sappers get wiped from repairing it and the unit inside bleeds from being shot at, so it does have a reinforcement cost in practice
2. It has two mortars that are less cost efficient than two normal mortars. It outranges other mortars (only by 9 if you compare barrages) but other mortars can move to always be in range.
3. It can't move, so it will do less damage overall unless the battlefield stays in one place (which it may well do on bad maps like rails & metal, road to kharkov etc. but still)

Soviets are balanced if you go T2, weak when you go conscripts or T1.

T1:
Penals are hard countered by Ost machine guns not just in the unit matchup itself, but also because you'll have less units than Ost does if you open with T1. OKW can do basically the same thing with mg34 or just swarm them with more infantry.
Snipers don't target the gunner anymore, making them useless for supporting infantry attacks when you have to take out mgs and they weren't even good at it in the first place because the gun gets recrewed faster than their slow reload. And snipers in general don't fit T1, they would be more use with maxims which are better at being meat shields and controlling the map for them.
Clown cars are a suicide carrier.

Ost basic units and play doesn't just work against T1, it hard-counters it. OKW MG34 and/or swarm of infantry also beats T1.

Conscripts will lose in combat to Ost and OKW and they don't have any out of combat advantage like faster capping to make up for it. It's also too expensive to support conscripts with either T1 or T2 or vice versa which delays your first few unit timings too much, it just doesn't work in practice unlike what the devs intended.

T2:
Maxims are easily the best Soviet opening unit.
Mortars provide a counter for garrisoned units, which the other starts can't deal with reliably, and also works well with maxims whereas the other starts only have units that don't work well together.
AT guns are actually better with a guards doctrine than T1 garbage penals are, because you need two AT units to reliably beat a light vehicle anyway and guards + AT gun scales better against tanks than guards + guards, AT gun has a longer range and thus isn't as vulnerable to suppression or just getting bled.

T1 and Conscripts require that your opponent is incompetent just to work at all, whereas T2 is reliably good. T1 used to be good because of sniper+clown car, overpowered even before they nerfed and eventually removed it, and it had to be changed. Now it's garbage. Conscripts have always sucked. T2 has always been the most reliable.

they still have 2 years on their 5 year plan for this game.

It began with the planning of the rest of CoH2's roadmap.

Three months were given to the bugs - immortal, festering and most hated of all things.
TThree were given to monitoring the balance, a great struggle over the course of several years.
And eighteen, eighteen were given to the skins, for above all else... Relic desires dollars.

But they were all of them deceptions, for another feature was worked on.

In the land of Vancouver, in the coders' dens at Relic Headquarters, the Dark Lord Kyle made in secret a Master Patch to overshadow all others. And into this patch he poured his bugs, his imbalance, and his will to troll all players.....

Arty was a big problem to deal with in war, and so it is in the game. Destroy arty or arty will destroy you.

Unless it's a field howitzer.