The real core issue with the state of botlane that Riot knows, but doesn't want to admit....

#Game pacing.

I honestly can't believe it took me this long to connect the dots, but it's so obvious.

Back in 2O17, the infamous "ADC in 2k17" meme was so widespread that it caused Riot to respond with changes to ADC. However, unlike what the meme implies, ADCs were not even weak in 2K17. They were still in near every game and and effectively mandatory save for Ziggs. The real cause of the issue was that ADC players felt they didn't have any impact.

The reason for this is because the pace of the game changed to where it was an early game meta, and ADC's were a mid to late game scaling archetype. Because of this, ADCs felt shafted not because they were actually weak, but because they never actually got the change to come online in most of their games.

So how does Riot address this you ask? _By buffing ADCs so that they come online faster and sooner. _ This on top of Support being buffed repeatedly just to make the role more appealing resulted in a huge artificial shift in power towards botlane

And the unfortunate part about this is that Riot knows this. As i have been saying since then, there isn't a way Riot isn't aware of this and are truly just that incredibly incompetent. As much as they fuck up, they have proven time and time again that they ARE competent and DO in fact listen. The only time they don't is when they have a rigid ulterior motive/vision they aren't willing to compromise.

Riot has been making an active effort to make games shorter for roughly the last 3 seasons or so now. And as a result, I don't see them making any changes that will fix this core issue since they seem adamant about making games last 15 minutes.

On a side note, i just want to point out that I DO in fact find it important that Bot lane comes online later in the game. The reason being that it was the thing keeping the number advantage of botlane in check in terms of agency.

Because Botlane came online later, botlane getting ahead wasn't nearly as oppressive as it is now. Currently if you get top or mid ahead, you get 1 person ahead. If you get Botlane ahead, you get 2 people ahead, making it strictly the best lane to focus and the one with more power because you are getting 2 people ahead and putting 2 of the enemy behind.

By having botlane scale later in the game, you could allow all individual players to have agency without botlane taking immediate priority, without just making Both botlaners with half a champion.