Runes just arent user friendly
Ever since the runes system came into place. Ive always felt that it just isnt suited for player use. Half the game modes dont give you enough time to set them up. Yet the runes were designed for every single character to tailor them to enhance very specific areas of their kits. Yet unless its one of your mains, you dont have anything set up. Having a generic page for a specific lane or purpose doesnt work nearly as well as it did with the old rune system, and mostly just ends up being a liability because there is so many slots that are just outright wasted. To this day, I have no idea why riot decided to have rune pages for all champions. I genuinely wish that there was just a singular rune page for every single champ on the roster. Where you could have a separate spellbook for each character. You load in and you immediately have a page ready for that character. Tweak it if you want but you dont have to outright make a new page every time. Say said character has multiple builds that requires different rune setups. Then thats where buying runepages could come in. buy a rune page for that specific spellbook and expand. It wouldnt be hard to do, yet it would be so much more user friendly. Frankly, it feels like just another set up designed to pander to the massive one trick player base thats grown in popularity since content creators have shifted that way. Aram is the worst for this, as you barely get enough time to set up your runes unless you KNOW exactly what you need, and have no intention on trading or rerolling.
Ive tried to come up with any reason why they would have preferred lives method of runes but nothing really comes up. They could potencially sell more rune pages through this layout. People could actually discuss strategy and team comp builds instead of having to spend all lobby time designing their runes, and above all else its just less stuff to deal with. Other mobas do similar things with their set ups. Hots may not have runes, but its able to bind their specific cosmetics to a single character so you dont need to waste time setting that up.
If riot is keen in minimizing the post game lobby time like they have been, then make it so that theres less set up before the game
