Balancing Gragas and a message to Meddler.

Hi there I'm a diamond mid main and i wanted to create a discussion on the current problem that gragas faces.

For the longest time now riot has had the major problem of balancing Gragas, the issue came from after his rework that created the issue of having Gragas be a blatantly too powerful ap tank jungler that could do everything other junglers could. The biggest problem of all was his flash E into ult combo that could basically single target out squishies with no counterplay.

In order for riot to fix this they decided to implement what I think is the worst balance ever created, which is the ult nerf that killed him in competitive and reduced his winrate by now 5% as well as making his play rate reduce to 2%.

Enough with the backstory, the real discussion is I think riot went a wrong way in balancing this problem. So just WHAT do I think riot could have done better? My biggest annoyance is that riot tries to only balance gragas around his tanking, which is the wrong way to approach things. It is clear that many Gragas players such as myself or people on reddit.com/r/gragasmains and youtubers like woody fruity enjoy the AP version of him. I am not saying to bring back his old ap mage kit because that would cause community backlash.

What I feel riot could have done much better in balancing him is bringing back Gragas' OLD E. His old E before the rework would slow instead of stun and had incredible clearing in the jungle and higher AP/AD scaling. This old E would suddenly add counterplay to his ult without having it be nerfed into the clunky craphole it is now. This would also help AP gragas players and even give way to an AD bruiser build that popular players have done before.

What do you guys think? And I want to personally ask @Meddler what are his thoughts on this change as well as why he specifically nerfed Gragas the way he did?