Yeh... the timing of 8.1 was a bit confusing and probably set expectations a bit too high for players. Meddler tried to address it in his quick gameplay thoughts - but that particular section didn't get much visibility. The 8.1 patch actually "locked" before Christmas, and was worked on at the same time as 7.24b. We usually would have put more time into the 8.1 patch, but were focused instead on getting some short term wins for top lane and a few other notable areas around the map into 7.24b. To clarify - 7.24b wasn't meant to "solve" top lane, or the rest of the game for that matter, but it felt like there was enough low hanging fruit that getting an additional patch out before Christmas was the right way to go, rather than have a 5 week break between 7.24 and 8.1
At any rate, what this meant for 8.1 was that there was less content than usual, while players were probably looking to it to start hitting on some of the problems that they were feeling - which unfortunately wasn't the case. We have a pretty substantial number of changes going into 8.2 (some have started to hit the PBE), some are still in exploration like a number of new runes/tweaks to current ones.
To provide a super high level summary of what our direction for League is - since what you're asking is a super deep question, is to get the game to a point where you feel like you're constantly presented with the opportunity to make nuanced decisions that can help you win a game of League. Whether that's what champion you take, what runes you go with, what items you buy, how you rotate around the map etc etc. It was a large part of why we redid runes and masteries as a system in the first place, the old system provided important decisions, but they weren't particularly meaningful, and very rarely did they ever change (I'm not talking about switching between taking scaling hp vs armor yellows). We have a long way to go yet for runes to be as flexible as we want, but we have a lot of internal focus on adjusting current runes and creating new ones to get it there over the long run. In regards to more in game positions we're also doing some deeper vision/direction setting for where we want to take every position going into the new year and beyond. We're also looking at things like broadening the number of positions a champion can be considered in that are also sustainable to help feed into the idea of being faced with nuanced decision making. Morgana and Zyra could be looked at as the first real foray into this space. While we didn't quite nail it yet, we wanted players to be able to think about taking them in the jungle if they wanted to for a variety of reasons.
I would argue that one of the things (and please let me stress the ONE in that statement) that may feed into your perception of the game feeling less tactical, is the fact that the relative skill level of players and their mastery over League seems to be accelerating. When you look at how teams tend to play around the bot side of the map and look to gain a lead from diving a turret with a jungler, or having mid roam down and flank for a 4v2 which then turns into an objective/s. In prior years, if bot turret went down, you'd typically see the adc and support back, buy items, and then head right back down their lane. These days, players have caught onto the idea of rotating that power around the map, moving their top laner to bot, and then taking the top turret further accelerating their lead (this is just one example). As more and more players learn what optimal strategy/tactics they should employ in a game when they want to win, games can feel less tactical/strategic as they become more par for the course. This is a huge reason why we update the game every two weeks, since if left untouched, the game would become more and more about optimizing one or two strategies that are proven to work which would then very quickly become stale.
In regards to the comment about fast paced games, I don't have too much for you atm, but we're doing a lot of investigation into general game pacing, game length, bloodiness etc, to find areas where we can tune back some of the more egregious experiences, but I will definitively say that we're not looking at making the average game 45 minutes (right now average game length is 30.5 minutes +/- ~2 minutes based on mmr range and region). The primary things we need to make sure to maintain are the rough lengths of various phases of the game - aka lane phase shouldn't be over at something silly like 4 minutes, you shouldn't be able to close out the game at 15 minutes on one team fight etc.
That got more wordy than I intended - please keep in mind this is my personal attempt at summarizing thoughts from a variety of teams though I hope it provides a bit more insight/context.
Edit: Oh, and about the Heimer nerf - ask any melee top laner or jungler who's tried to gank a Heimer and you'll probably find their opinion quite different regarding the nerf.
