One good reason reworks tend to suck

The community.

Example: Malzahar. Everyone whines about Malzahar. Malz had an extremely non-interactive and boring play pattern where he just DoT'd mininos and spammed dance emotes. Riot wanted to fix this so he's now up for a rework, right? Now, since I commonly lurk these boards, lemme give you a few bullets of the shit I saw.

• "Man, I really want AD MALZ to be good! I love chasing people around with my VOIDLINGS! :D"

• "This is the best time to make JUNGLE MALZ a thing. HELL YEAH BOI!"

So Riot's now tasked with making a mage champion compatible with AD off-builds, voidling spam, and...jungling. In other words, random community wish listing had Riot try to accomplish too much with a small project and they got this.

Example: Sona. Sona had a long stint of being sort of left alone and forgotten in the game because Riot didn't know what the hell to do with her. They announce that they're working on her, and what does half of the comments say?

"Man if only we could make her more like FUCKING URF. MAN THAT'S MY SHIT. MAKE HER MORE SPAMMY RITO!"

Nothing addressing her outdated peel (She's the ONLY support that still supports with no hard cc on a basic spell) or her feast/famine game play pattern. Just "play like URF". Sure enough, Riot did EXACTLY that...and we're around the same "Stomp low elo into the dirt while being a laughing stock in higher elo" area we were before. When she was stomping the hell out of the entire game her pro play win rate was like 33%...but she's also the game's primary team fighting, aoe support...and she can't do that better than a talking fish or a yoga instructor. She has to be outlandishly broken as she is now to stand a snowball of a chance in an environment that literally is her calling as a champion. No one realized we could have tried to ask for fixes to some of her core issues when we had the chance because it was instead used on making her slam buttons randomly even more than before her mini-rework. Literally WHY?

And this type of thing is seen time and time again, like the clamoring I saw over AP Miss Fortune not being a thing anymore (like it needed to be anyway). Just sort of a realization I had.