Masteries. Runes. Should They Exist?

Would it be better to get rid of runes and masteries? Let's ignore the whole thing about the spent ip and rp and debate the aforementioned question. I personally think it would be theoretically better to get rid of runes and masteries. Items are fine of course.

Runes

• Why is tier two even a thing? You know your opponents will have tier 3, so settling for tier 2 runes automatically puts you behind the opponent. It's not even worth it for testing. I can't effectively test it if everyone I test it against is crushing me with their tier 3 runes.

• Runes are unnecessary. Let's say player A and player B are both playing ADCs. Player A starts with life steal, but only has 60 starting AD. Player B starts with 75 AD, but nothing for sustain. Without runes, this would be a more interesting matchup. With runes, they would just balance it out. Player A would get runes that just give him that extra 15 AD to catch up. Player B would just get life steal runes. What's the point? They're just equaling everything out and making the fight less interesting.

• It sucks for new players. They have to buy these runes with ip that could've and should've been used for buying new champs, having fun, and learning the game. Instead, they grind a crap ton of rp to complete a page. Most of the time, they just find out they built a terrible page with what would've been enough ip to buy a 6300 champ. They can't even just decide to just not build a page. Then, they would automatically be weaker than anyone they played against.

• Building Rune pages is a boring, tedious grind. Who ever has fun building a page? It takes 2 or 3 matches just to buy one rune. It's not even fun in a character building, RPG sort of way. RPGs allow you to build a unique character by your design that no one else is playing. Throwing in a couple extra stats here and there on a champion that is already made and set out for you is not unique. I'll even go a little deeper. I can guess that 9 out of 10 times that your Panth, 9x flat ad reds, 9x flat mr blues, 9x flat armor yellows, and 3x purples (which are probably just more damage) are the same exact thing as your lane opponents runes. If there's a difference, it's by one category. Oh cool my Lucian has slightly more AD than your Cait. WOW. Totally worth the effort.

• It would be better if everyone just played the game with the champ on its original stats. There are too many variables. When you play literally any other competitive game, this ridiculous rune system LOL uses cannot be seen. The runes are also variables that affect the match from outside of the match. That's just plain poor design if you ask me. When you're against someone in any sort of game or battle, it's supposed to be you and him. Right there. Face to face. There shouldn't be a bunch of random performance drugs you shot up beforehand. Just you and him. Right then. And right there.

• Outside variables should not have so much power over the match. That's almost as bad as lag. I have scaling CDR runes that give me 10% CDR around level 15 or 16 I would say. Technically speaking, I don't even have to buy boots of lucidity like one without this outside variable would have to. That is simply just not balanced.

Masteries

1. Again, let us fight with our champions in their purest form. If Yasuo wasn't designed with lane sustain, then I shouldn't be able to throw sustain on him with variables from outside of the match. It's just imbalanced. Nasus already has a slow that lasts a century. It is extremely imbalanced for me to be able to throw a speed boost on him to boot. If the boost comes from an item I purchased, then it's fine. It is not fine for me to just throw a page together from outside of the match that makes a whole item purchase inside of the match less meaningful. Why buy a phage when I can just have storm raiders for free? In fact, why don't I just combine the two and make it even more cheap?? See? That is not balanced design.
2. These little stats are impossible to balance. They are either too big of a problem to ignore, or too small of a benefit to notice. There is no in between. They are clearly not balanced because Riot is constantly tweaking and reworking them. I stayed off of League for 3 months, I think. When I came back, warlords was completely different. At first, it was too big of a problem because of all of the life steal. I don't think I have to explain the old warlord. They nerfed it. It was still too big of a problem. A speed boost on top of life steal and it can scale with crit? Come on now. Yasuo's name is written all over that thing. That's just one of the masteries. Don't let me get into the rest of them. What's going to happen to these masteries you ask? More nerfs. More buffs. More reworks. Just more necessary unnecessary work for Riot.

Wait a minute. I just got a call. click What's that? They're reworking runes AND masteries? Huh? They're... turning them into some weird combination thing? click Riot will forever be stuck in a balancing limbo.

I understand that we can't just simply get rid of masteries and runes. There's too much money involved. I'm not even sure how they're going to work it out with the heavy rune/mastery rework they're doing at the end of this current season. I just wanted to state my opinion. My main point in writing this is for anyone reading this to seriously consider, "Are runes and masteries really worth the trouble? Are the benefits really THAT great? Would we have been better off without them this whole time?"