Opinions about kindred are like nipples

Everyone has one, right?

Yeah anyway, here's my opinion on kindred.

1. They're not actually as feast or famine as people think. Despite how horribly generic marksman items are, it's hard to deny that they are pretty darn strong, to the point that you will pretty much always do damage with a botrk and a LW, even if you entirely ignore your passive. On the other hand, I think that their passive is still entirely necessary, since they have to do the job of an adc (the richest role usually) on a jungler's budget. Lane kindred can effectively play as an adc (like vayne but less selfish of an ult), which fixes their gold problem but gimps her stacks moderately (that mark always appears on red side golems I swear), and that's absolutely a fair tradeoff . Lane kindred is pretty annoyingly hard to kill though, which makes them a great counter for poke lanes since they can bring her own sustain, and all-in lanes once they hit six, sort of.

2. Their ult has the most counterplay of any since Jinx. There are quite a few ways to completely make it useless, which is fine because of how powerful it is. You can stun her to prevent her from casting it, time your stun to simply kill everyone once they come out of it (though that is tricky because both teams can do it), and in a few cases its possible to just walk away because her ulting just gave you a free objective in a pre-dragon/baron fight. Or just pick ("Oh, you ulted? Good I was waiting for you to use that!" presses wer two seconds in for free kill) (use your ult against you, and prevents your team from doing it back) , or really just anyone with a displacement ability or AoE CC ability that can be used to just totally render the ult useless or counterproductive.

3. They, at this moment, basically don't have mana. I've stayed in a lane for fifteen minutes with only base mana regen using abilities frequently enough to shove the enemy laners out without going oom. I get that they need to not run oom during jungle clears, but with solely machete this just isn't an issue. They're like new gangplank in that there are very few times where their mana bar becomes relevant, and most of the time they just don't have to consider it (the only time you do is if you spam w and q off cooldown, which you just shouldn't. Save w for important times). This is most likely a bad thing.

TL;DR: Kindred is actually super well designed with actual counterplay, but could probably need some number tuning especially on her mana costs, which don't feel that relevant.