Some thoughts on Support, SightStone, and Stealth from a Shaco main

Wards currently have next-to-zero innate counterplay. The tiny bit of innate counterplay they have is the split second of visibility before they become invisible and the ward debris they leave upon dying. It's also nearly impossible to be stealthy (in the true sense of the word) because it is very difficult to ascertain if the enemy currently has vision of you or info of your whereabouts.

The most common defensive feature a ward has is invisibility. You can't see most wards, and have very few clues to go off of. Imagine, a stealth game where the obstacles you're suppose to be avoiding can't be seen and their position is unknown. That's exactly what we have with wards. How they control territory, or which territory is being controlled via wards, isn't evident to the players by virtue of the wards themselves. If you know about a ward's position it was because you saw your opponent place that ward, with himself likely having no idea that you had eyes on him. Wards don't give information to the enemy that they can use to their advantage outside of ward debris. The entire vision game is predicated on remembering a map of the likeliest warding spots just to participate in countering your opponent's vision setup (using a very limited set of item specific hard-counters or invisibility or alternate gank routes.)

To quote Xypherous talking about wards:

It's quite possibly the lamest building you can think of - 'Unmanned watchtower - does nothing but win.'"

The current functionality of wards flies in the face of everything that the stealth genre has taught us. One of the designers who worked on the Thief trilogy, Randy Smith, said that the most common aesthetic (i.e. a goal or gameplay fantasy, as Riot would say) a designer could aim for in making a stealth game is to:

Create the illusion of a securely guarded area that the player can sneak through by virtue of leveraging their unique abilities and tools to create and exploit security flaws."

Wards, in their current form, severely limit the possibility for stealth gameplay, precisely because their isn't much of anything to exploit. You can exploit their radius and skirt around them just outside of their vision range, which is actually a very good thing, but something that's very rarely seen, especially at my ELO. If your champion has invisibility in his or her kit you could use that to bypass wards, assuming the duration is long enough. If you've purchased one of the three items that hard-counters wards, you might could call that an outplay (but I wouldn't call it meaningful gameplay.)

It's the difference between something like Kalista's Sentinels and your standard yellow totem ward. Kalista's Sentinel's can be seen, as can their cone of vision, and their movement pattern is slow and consistent. They are clearly telegraphed, but in such a way that it demands some skill on behalf of the ganker / flanker to outmaneuver and get past them. You would have to be stealthy to do so. Contrast the gameplay of Kali's Sentinels with the static, invisible, 1000 unit AoE of sight that your yellow totem ward gives you. There's no real skill demanded on your part to outplay that ward. You either choose an alternate gank route or invisibility (both of which would require knowledge of the enemy ward in the first place) or... use one of the three items that hard-counter wards and come back later.

If Riot wants to make the support role more fun, or turn more people on to it, maybe they should take another look at their vision and stealth system. If all of our wards had some inherent counterplay or a way to outplay them unique to that ward, then we wouldn't necessarily need red trinket to counter their vision setup. And if all of the wards had some exploitable weakness, some flaw or limitation in their vision, then they wouldn't be so powerful, meaning they could stand to be cheaper, while at the same time those exploitable weaknesses, flaws, and limitations emphasize that stealth is required to outplay them. And if wards were cheaper, supports could afford real items and everyone could participate in warding equally. And because wards were so cheap, and everyone was participating in warding, things like SightStone and it's ilk wouldn't be strictly necessary.

TL;DR - Maybe what we need isn't more wards, but a greater selection and variety of vision options, with their own exploitable weaknesses and unique benefits.

For the record, Riot has repeatedly confused stealth with invisibility. The two are not the same. You can be invisible and not be stealthed. Stealth is a mindset and a play-style. Invisibility is the game mechanic. (This nonsense about 'camouflage' just illustrates the confusion that has overtaken the Rioters. 'Camouflage' is just invisibility based on proximity. Classifying it as a type of 'stealth' is misleading at best.)

Stealth: (stĕlth) n. cautious and surreptitious action or movement; the quality or characteristic of being furtive or covert.

Invisibility: (ĭn-vĭzˈə-bəl) n. not visible; out of sight; unseen; impossible to view.