The following will be off topic:
People can debate whether or not new storms are stronger than old storms, but I don't think there could even be an argument about which version is more fun to use and more unique compared to the rest of ostheers unit roster. I said this before, when I read your post, I thought it was great that even though you said you faced a much more skilled player and got slaughtered, you still had fun using the unit.
Even more off topic:
A lot of the arguments against the storm changes were that they felt storms would be weaker (not that their stats were even set in stone...). Again, their power level is debatable, but I think the point is that storms didnt need a raw power increase. Complaints/issues with stormtroopers were never that they were too weak, but that they people would usually rather just use pgrens since they do a lot of the same things. Thats why arguments based on powerlevel for new storms being bad never convinced me the changes werent good (and honestly, most of the reasons were power level arguments), esepcially when the numbers were hardly even decided on. My point is, I think people focused too much on power level and not on how much fun the unit was to use.
Imo, if we stuck with the old storm design, we could make them viable, but not fun. The new storm design gives us the chance to do both, and given recent feedback (once most of the numbers were actually worked out; also, camo walking, took so long for that to finally go through, but it was more or less planned since the beginning...), we're probably close to it.