Riot's way of balancing the game is weird

Preseason came and so did the new runes system. The intention behind the new system was to "give players an oppportunity for a more individual playstyle" by choosing really characteristic and unique runes. And yes, the new runes are great in that aspect.

Since then, a couple of patches and fixes occured. And although some runes got slightly nerfed, there are also a lot of champions that got buffed or nerfed, in case they could abuse a rune or the lack of good base stats on all champions too hard (Ez, Sona etc.).

And this, in my opinion, is outright bad. Why? It leads to the conclusion that if you still want to play these nerfed champs, it's now mandatory that you choose your "OP rune" on him/her to still be viable.

Remember how I introduced this post? Riot wanted to give us more freedom and creativity by offering a widespread set of runes to play. This is now obsolete for at least some champions, because they are only playable if you have one specific rune set.

Instead, Riot should have altered the runes. The champs were fine at one point, then came the unbalanced runes, so why not balance out the runes instead of "imbalance" the champs to accomodiate certain rune setups? I cannot follow this thought process. Leona is too strong with Aftershock? Okay, then go and change Aftershock instead of nerfing her W, so that without Aftershock, she has a significant disadvantage. Just to give one example.

What is your opinion?