@Riot Can we have a Calm chat about Runes?

Lets be brutally honest here. Most of League's playerbase hates Runes. I hate runes, you hate runes, and honestly there are several strong reasons for this.

Cons

Massive gate for new players due to excessive rune price and rune slots being gated behind Levels.

Champion specific rune pages (and maximum customisation) take an age to be able to do due to only having 2 pages and extra pages being EXPENSIVE

Some runes are utterly obsolete. Such as Gold Generation and Time Dead, even crit runes on any one that isn't Yasuo. This discourages unique builds and styles.

Now this is meant to be a calm balanced discussion, so what are Runes' pros?

Pros

Allows deep customisation based on playstyle and champion, encouraging unique styles.

Allows players to proactively shore up their weaknesses or magnify strengths pre game.

The biggest problem is that getting to that excellent level of customisation is heavily gated and unpleasant to grind through. I would love to be able to customise my favourite champions pre game stats based on how i like to play them, but the current system doesn't allow that.

So any Rioters that have influence over this, what are your opinions of Runes in their current state and are we going to see improvements soon?