SUMMONERS; major culprit behind Top Lane's state & general current feel of the game. Hear me out.

The Risk vs Reward of LoL has severely warped in past seasons. [[ TL;DR at the bottom ]]

#Towers: (particularly the First) now give more value to the team that gets them (it); alongside being relatively easy to shred due to the amount of factors that now impact them. (MPEN/AP/LETH/HERALD/DEMOLISH/+MINIONS) This coupled with other factors [ or even on it's own ] can make bouncing back feel difficult.

As a result, making a decision anywhere on the map that involves leaving your turrets alone can be rather dangerous. Meaning if you need to go stop that ADC from farming, you may be losing much more than you'd planned. Now in a 5v5 scenario in which you know everyone, it isn't organized chaos; but we play SOLO QUEUE -- which IS.

You make one decent call to assist your team, and suddenly Death himself is beating down your Inhibitor Turret with his pet Herald and Demolish Rune. It just feels bad.

#Everything-Creeping: It's no secret we've had a serious CDR/Mobility/CC/Damage creep issue for a while now. CDR is abundant (and "limited resource" is a joke now), allowing for the spamming of skills alongside autos - thereby shoving waves faster and dishing out more damage in a fight. Mobility+CC are accessible in many more champions now, and alongside easily-accessible CDR, everyone's a speeding bear trap (except Volibear) that you need AD Carry 'Burst Per Second' or an abundance of CC / point & click CC to put them in their place. Damage is found amplified through MANY passives on items now, only contributing to this deathly cycle -- these passives would ARGUABLY end up being OK with the reduction of other factors. Despite all this, realistically, you get this stuff at...what cost?

#Top Lane A moment of prayer for the lonely lane up above suffering not only due to everything that has changed in the game mentioned thus far, but also the neglect of Bruisers and ?impressive? base stats of some specific tanks. This lane is suffering due to all of the above factors, the aforementioned factor, as well as the reality that at this time -- Bot Side is just too juicy. The new Drakes, while interesting but no more interactive than the original, contribute to the Summoners trying to find Scrooge McDuck's vault down below - two fat sacks of gold, a relatively flimsy outer turret, and the inhabitants of the Drake pit.

I commend Riot for altering & implementing Herald to attempt increasing the team's interest in playing around Top a bit, but it makes far more than it's necessary contribution when everything is creeped behind it. I'm not done though with Top Lane; please read on.

#The Jungle & Top Lane Is no longer a place many Junglers have to spend farming. It's arguably a WASTE of time, to an extent, as has been proven by Korea's #1 Solo Queue Jungler. He takes buffs and camps lanes; hardly does much more than this. Taking his buffs into Top means easy dives, easy snowball, easy Herald, exacerbated snowball. But it isn't always Top. Sometimes it's Bot, because 2 being ahead can do significantly more on the map than 1 can. It doesn't matter though, the point is that the Jungler doesn't lose what he did in some of the earlier seasons by ganking over and over within a small time frame.

It's a contributing factor to Top Lane feeling like ass. You have a 2v1 (and in decent matchups, a 2v2) in Top, and there's no apparent moment of weakness for the assister, and thus EVEN LESS AGENCY than they already have.

#Agency Is my final topic. Because all of the above details note what's stripping away the sense of safety in this game. AD Carries have access to several forms of damage manipulation to bypass resistances, and as a result they're capable of shredding anything. Turrets do little to help in even early-game dive and are affected by many damage sources. Junglers don't need to sit back and rub one out in the Jungle, they can incessantly assist in map-wide snowballing and still be relatively useful later. Top Lane has lost any semblance of a "safety net" due to being heavily impacted by the changing of much of LoL. Stats that contribute to skill-usage/spamming and high AA damage are abundant in items and passives.

Aside from SOME Champions, there's little drawback to all that many stand to gain. And while I understand these changes may have been to give all players a sense of becoming stronger, it has only left many feeling as though their power has been stripped away. And that's just not fun.

TL;DR: Towers are impacted by an abundance of damage sources. Top Lane lacks agency and is heavily impacted by changes elsewhere in the game. CDR&Other stats have been incessantly creeped. Junglers can camp a lane with little farming to facilitate snowballing heavily. Game feels bad because slight snowballing (due to the above factors) feels as though Summoners are left with few to no options.