Is Kalista really as unplayable as people claim?

I feel like she's a handful of bugfixes and QoL changes away from being viable.

Unfortunately a lot of her issues come from her passive. Because it would feel horrible, her dash is on-attack instead of on-hit. This means it can't be cancelled. If you could cancel an on-attack dash you could potentially dash without attacking. This is all fair enough.

But considering how much Riot has been messing around with Stealth/Camo and Vision Control (control wards literally deny vision of a brush even if there's a ward in it) and the general dominance of Vayne and Twitch right now, Kalista's Attacks should NOT be falling off on targets not in vision (i.e. if they move into brush mid-flight). If anything, it pushes her already weak laning phase more than her late seeing as the attack animation is far shorter the faster her attack speed is (and therefore, generally, how far into the game she is).

She should also be able to stack up Rend prior to the ability coming off cooldown (perhaps when it has 90/80/70/60/50% of it's cooldown remaining based off level).

I'm actually okay with Kalista's attack speed being tied to her oathsworn - prior to this change her counterplay was very limited and the very act of picking her over any given ADC lacked meaningful decision making. Nowadays Kalista synergizes well with the likes of Blitz, Ali and Taric who can fed for themselves. Meanwhile Kalista-Soraka may well be one of the weakest bot lanes in the game since focusing the Soraka because all the more beneficial. And why shouldn't a team-reliant Utility Marksman be easily punished for farming in a side lane instead of grouping?