I picked Kindred...

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And how the hell does early game have anything to do with how he scales?

Because you're both junglers. How either of you secures a lead is crucial to determining how you scale. If he's dead then he can't farm but you can. Vice versa. He needs items (not to mention his ultimate) in order to burst you but your DPS not only starts out higher but consistently will remain higher if you actually use your advantage.

Assassins, divers, and marksmen junglers only really differentiate once they get out of laning phase. Assassins fuck marksman - Kindred's a marksman, Graves is an assasin.

Syndra would be an assassin by that logic and she obviously isn't. She's a burst mage. The differentiation is in their kits and the jobs they're meant to fulfill. Assassins kill people caught out, divers tend to be initiators, and marksmen have classifications between AD caster and auto-attacker. Graves is an AD caster, and Kindred also is but has AA synergy on her W/E.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Kindred does not scale well with gold - the only stats worth buying on her are attack speed, armor pen, and defensive stats. Gold rarely supplies those effectively.

I think you need to look up what scaling means. You can't honestly believe that a 0 gold Kindred is no different than a Bloodrazor 4% HP on-hit + Runaan's DPS increase and Black Cleaver 30% armor shred + AD/HP/CDR. Don't make statements like that if you don't want to look like a fool. AD/AP isn't everything there is to scaling.

Like I said, Kindred wins early game and is heavily outclassed come mid game.

Snowballed junglers don't lose mid-game unless you've allowed the opponent to recover that much, meaning you're not that good of a jungler. I've never been outclassed by mid-game by people who I've already set behind.

But it doesn't - if mages have been complaining about getting oneshot when they have Zhonyas, how is a measly Ninja Tabi gonna stop them?

Because a snowballed jungler is going to not care about your stats as much. You're paying too much attention to the complaints and not the actual way it happens in the game. Don't be a low elo sheep.

Using your ult in a duel with him is a terrible idea, and it should never be popped. After it does, it's a complete burst duel, and Graves has got far more of that. If you're gonna win a duel against Graves, you're not gonna use your ult.

You don't need to if he's not going to be able to kill you, and if you're ahead then it's not likely in the first place. But if you do need it, then you use it. Common sense.

If you don't have more than 3 marks by mid game then you must not be very successful at Kindred. Either that, or marks are a lot harder to get in whatever your elo is because Fiora's dont heavily over extend without vision.

You don't need marks to win a game. They're nice to have sure, but they're not 100% necessary if the jungler is 0/3 and you're constantly counter-ganking/counter-jungling him. Experienced Kindred players know this already and just capitalize on what plays they can do. You can't mark the same easy target twice in a row after all. It's a common misconception I see on this forum posted by people like you who do not study/play Kindred but want to make claims after 1-2 games.

Have you played against Warwick? The first thing you feel is his 200 damage Q at lvl 5. That's burst, right there. It does kinda fall off, late game it only does about 300 damage, not usually enough to kill you. Late game, he's also much more auto attack reliant, but early game, his Q is the majority of his damage and at least half of it.

200 base damage isn't that high when it's his only damage spell. Especially when you're usually not going to be building items that add to its inherent scaling unlike assassins who benefit from AD.

Ah, but you see, a burst meta does not mean all the champions are burst champions. It simply means that everyone is doing burst, rather, all the meta champions. There's a reason why all the strong champions are burst based.

Burst is strong right now but you over-generalized and made ignorant claims about who bursts due to it.

By burst, I mean doing the majority of your damage over a short period of time. Riven is a burst champion because her damage is separated into multiple burst combos (if you're tanky). Xin is a DPS champion, because although he may do 100% of your health in a short amount of time if you're squishy, his damage is mostly loaded into auto attacking over and over again.

You've got the definition pretty much correct, but the flaw in your logic comes from thinking that a spellcast = burst and AAs = DPS. DPS is what we use to gauge sustained damage, and it's slang. The true meaning of DPS is damage per second, which applies to any damage. Burst = high initial DPS, sustained damage (what we call DPS) = constant damage numbers. Every champion has a DPS limit and it's especially evident in the early game. Involve what I said about Kindred and Graves, and Kindred's DPS limit is way higher than Graves even if she can't copy his burst. High initial DPS has to be enough to kill or nearly kill the opponent for it to be called burst, otherwise it's just high initial DPS.