You hit the nail on the head. It's a fundamentally flawed game as a result of its original pay-to-win design that was merely band-aided over by converting it to a progression system.

The only way to assess it from a balance perspective is in a lobby where everyone has everything unlocked, and that's infeasible because of player retention being so bad.

I'm hoping Kyber (private servers) take the structural bones of the game (technical performance and aesthetic) and allow modding to fundamentally mechanically change the game to the same extent that modding has for skyrim because I don't believe a better base for community improvement will ever exist.