Discussion: When does Skill Ceiling Become More Work Than Fun?

When you achieve mastery of a champ, you want people to know. Yes, you play a lot of Azir, but can you shuffle? Not all champs have such a visual display of mastery, but we all have our things. I play a ton of Maokai and while there's not a lot of variability, there is the muscle memory of knowing how to use all 4 abilites to make a tower dive successful is the difference between me and the FOTM club.

Like Jarvan, and only dying because of the bad interplay between his QE occasionally.

But at a certain point, the intricacy of the combos seems to become work (to me anyway) so i'm asking. When does the ability to show mastery become work? Obviously this is an opinion question, but some things are objectively true. Mastery on Maokai is less difficult than mastery on Azir. That's fair. But I ask this question in terms of Ryze, or even Sona. I think Sona is more forgiving if you're not paying attention to her passive, but with Ryze, not learning the systematic ways in which he can be top tier (for Ryze) is a wide gap.

Should it be?

I've always found Ryze to be interesting. He scales with mana, he has good CC, and he presumably has a nuke though I've never felt Veigar-level of power with him. I've always thought of bringing him into a support role but the way he's arrange it really seems like that's not logical. I don't want the whole discussion to be about Ryze, he's just who I think of, but more generally, when does a Skill Ceiling hit the point of diminishing returns on fun?