If Riot wants to fix damage creep, they should start by nerfing Red Smite.

Here's a quick tooltip for those of you unsure of what smite does.

Challenging Smite can be cast on enemy champions, Sight icon revealing them for 4 seconds, reducing their damage against you by 20% and making them take 60 - 162 (based on level) true damage over 3 seconds from your basic attacks for the duration.

Imagine tagging someone with half an ignite and half an exhaust at the same time. That's roughly what Challenging Smite does to your opponent in terms of damage (you're gonna hit someone with multiple times to proc the true damage, so it generally gets the value of about an ignite's worth of damage). On top of that, ignite and exhaust are on 3+ minute CDs, while Smite is only on a 1.5 minute CD. It's no surprise that the champions that are top tier right now are all duelists. It's also switched the jungler strategy to taking all the buffs, clearing your jungle in record time, and transitioning to a 1 3 1 splitpush. Graves (the biggest offender) regularly comes out of my games with anywhere from a 1-3 level lead on the solo lanes.

Why is this a problem? Because for all the pressure they have early on, and all the objective control they maintain into the late-game, junglers should not also be top tier duelists without gaining a kill lead. It makes the game too dependent on the jungler. This is especially true in high elo where you're expected to help contest scuttles, junglers will expect to help you if they invade and if they counter invade, and most of them refuse to reciprocate. They hoard kills, tax lanes heavily, don't share buffs, and you rely on them to secure big objectives. The jungler difference (or just how many resources a team pours into a jungler) will generally determine who wins the game and it's a frustrating experience.

Solution; nerf Red Smite. By reducing the true damage dealt, you lower the TTK by these champions dramatically. By lowering the damage reduction, you allow certain champions to counter them if they misstep. This forces you to pick something safer into those champions and by forcing you to play something with lower damage and higher tankiness, you're artificially lowering the damage in the game by making high damage picks less all-encompassing picks that can be blind picked into any scenario. Either solution does work but the point is to make Red Smite less efficient for the CD it has.