Corvid

Well, the Devshorts stream today indicated that DE are internally discussing some "QOL stuff... for semi-autos", so you might be in luck. The Devstream will apparently include more details.

"Concentrated Blast"

Something to note is that Deimos IRL is only ~16km on its longest dimension. For reference, if you put Deimos in the Strait of Dover (the narrowest part of the sea between England and France) it would only reach just over halfway across. There's not exactly much room for biome variance, even if we assume that Orokin construction efforts vastly increased its size.

It's worth noting that there was a window before Heart of Deimos came out where DE removed the need to use keys to access the Derelicts. I actually completed the Steel Path for them during this period. Personally, I think DE should move them back to being their own region, expand the tileset used for the Drift's caves and use that to fill in the Deimos mission nodes.

You say that as if the two options are mutually exclusive, when in reality the players calling for nerfs to the most overpowered frames are generally in favour of both. Look no further than the Inaros rework, which brought a frame that was memed on for its lacklustre kit up to a level where it's both decently powerful and fun to use. Those are changes that pretty much everyone is happy with.

At what point did they do this? Please point to a single piece of official marketing that specifically tries to get you to buy Dante on the basis of him being overpowered at launch.

Yeah, a thing that often gets left out of the story of Railjack's launch is that in the lead-up to it the community was throwing a fit and demanding that they release it ASAP regardless of whether it was ready to ship. AFAIR it's the only time in the game's history that the devs publicly went on record warning players to avoid the update's new content if they weren't prepared to deal with bugs.

I should note that I was mostly just throwing ideas out with regards to Saryn. I was actually aware of that mechanic, my thinking was that there could be another limiting factor on top of that one. Another idea that just came to mind is to turn Miasma into a channelled ability with a reduced range. Any spore-afflicted enemies that expire within the radius while it's active will spread sores to others, any who are outside that radius when they die won't spread the effect.

Well said, good points all around. Perhaps make it so that spores that are beyond a certain distance from Saryn decay and stop effecting enemies after a few seconds? Or make it so that each spore has a timed life rather than sticking to the enemy indefinitely, so players need to make sure to re-infect enemies regularly to keep the ability going. I dunno, I kinda like Saryn's ability to spread her plague long distances, so I'd rather make her upkeep more difficult to manage than reduce her effective range outright. As a Gauss main (albeit one who doesn't abuse TS), I agree, though I do wonder how drastic the change would need to be. As far as I'm aware the imbalance in this case is caused by an interaction between Archon Vitality and a hidden mechanic in TS' heat blast (a double cast effectively works like an amped up Expedite Suffering for Heat procs specifically, which is further amped by Archon Vitality's double proc), so just removing that interaction might be enough to fix that particular issue.

Have I tried soloing the endgame activity, that was specifically designed to be played by full squads of players using the strongest builds they could muster? No, can't say I have. Nor can I see how that is in any way relevant to "Dark Souls difficulty".

Where, at any point in the game's history, has this been the case?

Y'know, you could just answer the question if you actually thought I was wrong, because regardless of how many times you reiterate them, none of the things I quoted there were actual answers to it. I'll put it here one more time for ease of reference: If DE truly always listen to the players who want nerfs, how is the average player power so much stronger than it was back in 2013 that we've gone from level 40 being the peak to level 9999? If your next response isn't an answer to this very simple question, then I will take it as you conceding the point.

Isn't the only asymmetrical part of Lavos' design his helmet? And even then it's only his default.

It's a contradiction in what you are saying. According to you, DE is simultaneously trying to deliberately make things suck while at the same time also trying to make things not suck. These two ideas cannot both be true. Nice attempt at pathologising me though. Really helps to show the kind of mindset you're approaching this discussion with.

In other words, you don't have an answer. Which is to be expected, because you're trying to reconcile a belief with a reality that does not support it.