Riot on Why Kindred has been treated the way they have.

Taken from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/5oi6ri/all_the_ad_carry_mains_complain_about_their_role/

"Since I'm the one who pulled the final arrow from the quiver I'll pop in here and give some context as to why I "gutted" Kindred with the 6.13 nerfs.

Kindred had 7 straight patches of nerfs. This is true. Why? Because she was fundamentally broken. It's straight up not okay for a ranged carry jungler to be the #1 jungle duelist, which is what her kit allowed her to be. Melee junglers don't get to exist in a world like that. A comparison would be if Vayne could jungle at full health while having more tankiness and mobility than you in a duel, WHILE BEING RANGED. That was Kindred. The basic idea behind what makes Vayne somewhat okay to fight against early is that even though she beats you at range, she's squishy so if you get on her she dies. With healing and 27 armor that wasn't the case for Kindred and I'm not even talking about post 6 when she gets that ultimate.

So, I hit her pretty hard with that last patch. It was intentional though because, even if you don't believe it, I wanted to STOP THE CYCLE. I wanted to get her into a good place that was no longer broken at the core so we could BUFF her going into the future. The idea behind that final nerf was simple: make her take damage in the jungle like everyone else and make her squishy. My assumption was if those two things were true she would no longer invalidate the melees she played against and we could finally buff things about her like her damage output and ability to scale as the game goes on, heck maybe even make bounties a tad less binary (getting that first one is feast or famine for her jungle clear).

I put the changes in and the patch went out AND IT WORKED. She finally lost some duels and wasn't feeling nearly as oppressive to play against and yet could still clear the jungle and win games. Woooo! So where's those buffs I was talking about? Well something came up. Turns out that even after 6.13 experienced Kindred players were still putting up incredibly high jungle winrates. Higher than experienced Vi and Kha players and WAY higher than experienced Lee Sin players. She was still quite powerful it turned out, she just wasn't flavor of the month anymore. So yeah, couldn't really buff her.

That was all last season of course. New season, new jungle. Lee and Vi went insane. A lot of formerly powerful junglers took a big hit. I no longer work on live so I can't make changes or speak specifically to 2017 Kindred, but I imagine she's struggling a bit now as you mentioned and so maybe there's space in the future for those buffs. But yeah, that's they "why" of what happened. Also final note. I think you're not separating "reason to be picked" from "weak." A character with no reason to be picked is Aatrox. Like he actually doesn't do anything special even when strong asides from "kill teh dudes." A character who is(was?) weak is Kalista. You'd have lost if you had picked her, but her passive, ultimate, and stacking mechanics were very clear power points that gave her a reason to be picked , she just didn't have the baseline power to be able to win on top of that. With that ultimate, if Kindred is in trouble right now I'm pretty sure it's because she's weak (given the state of her+marksmen as whole+jungle bruisers), not because there's no reason to pick her."

I honestly think Kindred herself is not too bad now it's just that the environment around them puts them at a disadvantage. Hopefully Riot can find a way to be able to make them compete with meta junglers without making them blow past all the competition again.