GP rework doesn't seem to make him much stronger

Maybe this is just anecdotal evidence, but in basically every game I've seen the new GP in, he's lost lane or wasn't a significant threat latter in the game. Everyone was raving about the rework when it was first announced, but I'm not really seeing any big improvement on the champion.

Granted, hiis new passive is a definite improvement over his old one, which was borderline useless, although I question the effectiveness of GP's new E. The barrel sounds good in theory, with it ignoring 60% of armor and doing a good amount of damage, but it just seems so telegraphed to me. Every time I've laned against a GP who dropped a barrel on top of me, I was always able to defuse it before they could detonate it. I know that GPs are supposed to save a barrel to use to instantly detonate other barrels, but the entire thing just seems very telegraphed and obvious, and you can always predict when they're going to drop another barrel and avoid it.

Most of this is just my personal experience, so now I'm wondering what everyone else is thinking now that the new GP has been out for a while.