I just think that with the changes planned, it becomes no longer an ideal spell to have on every champion (even with the damage going back to 50/50). With the new range, you can usually actually see the source of a snowball when they throw it, rather than it just appearing at the edge of your screen with no knowledge of who threw it. Also, since you can pretty much see the champion when they throw it, it'll also mean that you actually have a chance to step forward and throw some poke down in return for them trying to use snowball.
And the cooldown of 40 seconds is actually significant enough to see the people who want to use it to engage actually hold on to the spell to use it when they actually have a good chance to engage, as opposed to just tossing it out on cooldown.
At least that's been my experience with it so far.
You're right, though, that there's not enough of an ARAM playerbase on the PBE to truly tell. I often have to queue for 20-30 minutes to find a game on there. I just know that even after the damage change currently on Live, I still felt like a detriment to the team if I didn't take snowball every game. On the PBE, it hasn't felt that way.
I guess my bottom line is this: The PBE changes, in my opinion, make the spell about as healthy as it could possibly be in the game mode (it's certainly not healthy on Live right now). Let the changes go through and see what happens. If the spell is still too overwhelming even after these changes, I think we finally have a good case for requesting that the spell be removed entirely and ask Riot to go back to the drawing board if they want to help improve ARAM.
