There is hope.

Even though there is a loud minority posting badly about Yasuo, it seems that riot Jag managed to sneak in a few tidbits in his piece about Evolving the Laning Fighter.

• "Meanwhile, Yasuo is a prime example of a champion that is heavily windowed in lane. Even when he’s trading on his opponent, he generally needs to regenerate resources before he can land a kill. His Way of the Wanderer (P) shield and the internal cooldowns on his Sweeping Blade (E) make it so that it’s unlikely he can brute force a kill by just sticking to a target (not until later when he has a lot of items, at least), since his advantage isn’t perpetuated by being in melee range. I don’t think we’d call Yasuo the epitome of laning counterplay (he can feel like a hard counter in some matchups), but we do think his kit does a lot well in terms of windowed power."

What this means to me, is that it feels as though Riot may in fact, NOT gut him into oblivion. But it continues.

• "Windowing kill opportunities makes it so a melee champion doesn’t have a binary success/failure condition dependent on one all-in confrontation, but instead requires repeated outplay moments to earn the lane victory. One drawback is that these lanes tend to feel very high intensity for both sides — a player losing to a Fiora or Yasuo that is repeatedly trading well on them every 5-10 seconds can feel heavily mentally taxed. However, patterns like these require riskier action from the winning melee champion, giving chances for jungler intervention or other outplay moments, whereas the older models would resolve a win/loss very quickly."

To sum it up, Yasuo's playstyle revolves around making a lot of calculated risk in order to consistently damage his opponent to the point of getting a kill. This is evident with his 3rd Q being pivotal in the laning phase.

One final piece I'd like to highlight is this:

• "Finally, let’s talk a bit about “overloading” kits. Many players have asked why we give our laning fighters access to so many tools and mechanics — sustain, waveclear, mobility, burst damage, sustained damage, etc. The easiest way to answer this is looking at the opposite question: What are champions with extremely focused strengths supposed to do in a long lane that features the most varied range of opponent abilities? The answer is that these single strengths must be overemphasized to the point of being excessively binary for them to even function."

Again, to summarize, Yasuo's kit is given a mixture so that there are multiple things the player can do in varying situations. It prevents the stale component of constantly NEEDING to do the same exact thing every game, and the same poke/all in playstyle in order to win. I'm glad that riot actually still feels this way, and are not caving to a small pool of people screaming at them with flame posts. Thank you riot.

Here is the link to the whole message: http://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/2016/12/dev-on-evolving-the-laning-fighter/