Opinion: When Snowballing is Easy, the game favors AFK over Newbs

Is it just me, or are these 26 minute games, this 5 hit tower system, that climb with the OP broken non-sense culture that we have, creating the conditions in which we'd rather have someone AFK than stay in the game and learn the game?

For the record, the question here is which does more damage. This is not an advocation for either system.

There's something weird about the bot lane. I can tell when someone doesn't ADC often because of their response time to things. Whether real or perceived, they seem to move like their learning to walk. Now obviously that's crazy because a champ doesn't move different from one player to the next, but it's something I can see in the ADC as opposed to my support.

And assuming the jungle is half-competent, it almost always means game over. It's weird but I find myself explaining things to the ADC more than most roles these days. E.g. "If they go all in on your support, you need to shoot them - not run away - elsewise there's nothing to make them think twice about it."

I suppose if you're going off the rails alone it's your problem. But it got me thinking: is it better to have an AFK (assuming your jungle fills the gap) than it is to have a bad player? And if it is better, then what does that say about the state of the game?

I don't really like giving my opinion after these types of posts because it assumes I'm not genuinely asking (I prefer discourse over upvotes) but it's hard to look at a game where a keen-eyed Lee Sin ganks the player trying to learn and carries the game on to absolute victory. I'm slightly nervous that the game is going toward the ARAM phase. 20 minute games where it's no longer an issue of who gets first tower, but who gets first blood.