The bans have encouraged weakness and entitlement

I don't like the bans. I support Riot in 99% of the decisions they make. One thing I did not like was when they expanded the bans from 6 to 10 total; one for everybody. Thankfully, they also gave an option to throw away the ban.

Guess what I choose now?

I used to always throw away my bans on a champion nobody played. I used to throw it away on Yorick, since nobody played Yorick. Then he got his rework and now, ironically, I play him all the time whenever I go top lane.

The bans encourage weakness. "But it's strategy by ban-" no. Everyone plays the exact same six champions and build the exact same thing and use the exact same strategy against ALL champions, regardless of their role, build and playstyle, which is just the same six champions everyone plays anyways. It isn't strategy if YOU don't change a damn thing no matter who you face against. It encourages weakness by banning whoever you perceive to be the strong meta at the moment or your counter or whatever.

Case in point, Darius. Darius is considered very strong in a glass cannon meta, which is basically all metas. Everyone wants all of the damage, so they all go all ADC/AD melee assassin in all roles, including support. Darius is strongest against fragile champions; it's his theme, to crush the weak, so with this overfocus on damage to the exclusion of things like defense, people are actively playing into the strengths of Darius and other champions like him.

In one game some weeks ago, I went Alistar support. When teamfights started happening, Darius would murderball our entire team, so I changed my tactics. I started not just focusing all of my crowd control on him, but shoving him with Headbutt far away from the teamfight while the rest of my team dealt with the enemy. I managed to get him from midlane into the river and jungle, all the while he couldn't hurt me because I was too durable, even with his Black Cleaver and passive armor pen, until my team finished his and came in to end him as well.

By banning the same champions all the time and never playing against them, you don't learn how they act, you don't learn to adapt to their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. I don't like saying this, but you don't learn to get good against them. Even worse, you continue to refuse to adapt and dig yourself deeper into the same old patterns and never learning to change your tactic if the current one doesn't work. I've said this before, but that is the thing that ruins the game's balance more than anything else.

When someone like me throws away their ban, I get a ton of shit from someone in the team without fail, who believes that on top of their own ban, they get mine as well. This is doubly true if you're a support, that somehow, the rest of the team believes they get to make the decisions for you. This degree of entitlement escalates to the point where, combined with the soul-annihilating defeatism in the culture right now, the entire team is ready to just give up before champions have even been picked, all because someone threw away their ban, much less when a champion IS picked.

This is why I want the champion bans to be banned. It has encouraged and exacerbated weakness in the community and coddled players who don't want to ever have to fight against champions like Darius, allowing them to never have to learn or adapt to changes in the game and entrench themselves even further into the same collective patterns to the point that the minions show more free will than they do.