New Role Selection and the Meta

I remember with the introduction of Team Builder, the question of whether or not role selection was enforcing the meta was highly debated and answered in the Q&A multiple times. Now that it's been replaced along with Ranked 5s, we've been forced to team up with a Top, Mid, Jungle, Support, and Bot unless with a premade five.

As a new player, I was enchanted with the idea of being placed in a huge map with endless possibility and strategy. Even when I warmed up to the meta that currently stands today, I wasn't completely satisfied with the explanations for why it was so. Why have two people bot when we can have one in the jungle for better ganks? Why are we all split up instead of grouping together as a band and killing things faster? Gradually, these questions became mere fantasies in my head and the game lost some of the uniqueness that drew me into it in the first place.

Now that a certain formation is forced, what's to stop ping the meta from staying the same forever? New players are forced to pick a particular role and adapt only to their particular lane game after game. Even if you were to have a group of five that were open to new ideas, MMR adjustments from Dynamic Queue would make the game more frustrating and less easy to work with. Blind pick is the only option in this case, and there you can't ban or counterpick champions that are threats to new strategies.

This is part of what has made me disenchanted with LoL recently. This conformity that is masked by the illusion of uniqueness with the sheer number of champions and items. Sooner or later, we'll get tired of this, and without another avenue of exploration, League will simply be the linear, predictable game that nobody wants it to be.

TL;DR-New role selection's enforcing of the current meta destroys some precious decision space in an otherwise epic game with endless possibilities.