I don't think the Swain rework worked at all.

Despite being a relatively recent release with new visuals and a modernized kit, no one is playing Swain. He's in the bottom 10 for playrates, he has no clear lane, his subreddit appears to only have the bare minimum in terms of activity. By every metric it looks like the rework alienated a huge chunk of his old fanbase without creating anything to draw in new fans as a replacement.

When updating his visuals, Riot removed a lot of the charm of the old (bald, cane, beatrice, birdform) to make something that looks sleek but not interesting. When updating his spells Riot made him burstier even though he's a battlemage, muddying his identity, and his soul fragment mechanic seems like it was stopped halfway through the design process (having fragments pre-6 does nothing, and getting max fragments between ults is trivial, so why not just remove the mechanic altogether and add healing to the spells that grant fragments?). As a mage he also has really clunky spells for farming and waveclear and fits into that weird space where he is picked as an anti-melee not because he's especially good against melee but simply because he doesn't have the range to bother other ranged champions so melee are the only match-ups left.

Are there Swain players on here? Do you miss anything from pre-rework? Can you explain why you seem to be so few and far between?