Character progress, his power, and features.

Back in the last league, I broke the threshold of 10k hours, and I can say that I have formed a style of play. He is different from many players with the same experience. I hate playing for profit. I don't sit over charts and divination balls to find out what type of farming will give me more divines per hour. I just want to play an ARPG and enjoy my character getting stronger.

But I'm not writing an autobiography, but leading up to a problem that is like an elephant in a room, which is hard to miss, but can be ignored if it's a feature.

Many people miss the 3.13 league, when there was an old harvest that allowed you to endlessly minmax a character, craft mirror tier items. What I miss is being able to play any build you want (off meta) and progress smoothly. Craft items for yourself at all stages of the game, both on white and red maps. And there was no feeling that "I will not spend all my resources on crafting an item that will not be perfect due to the fact that the ilvl is lower than 83", as well as "I will spend all my resources, but I will not get even a hint of the desired result" .
The current craft sucks.

You can draw a graph that shows the growth curve of the power of monsters relative to their level. And on top of this graph, draw the power of the character relative to the power of the monsters. Conditionally. The player, as a godslayer, should always be above the power of the monsters, but not too much. But closer to t14, the power of the monsters grows x10+ compared to t1, but the power of the player does not. And who doesn't care? For those whose build power is initially high, and by the time they reach t14, their power curve converges with the power curve of the mobs, but does not intersect.

As a result, there is a meta of overpower builds using the most dishonest and broken mechanics that have remained intact for 5+ leagues due to the fact that all forces are focused on PoE. And the most annoying thing is that these overpower builds most often have uninteresting gameplay, which is justified by high efficiency. But at the same time, such builds instantly become expensive and available only to those who have been grinding on an even more uninteresting and dishonest build that is too strong on a low budget.

But this is all on the surface, it has long been known. And not for the sake of platitudes, I began to write this.

In this league, I decided to just experiment, in the style of the old school 2.5.0, to take skill, ascedancy, and play "with soul". In my opinion, this is one of the best ways to play PoE, creating something unique, instead of soullessly copying a finished build (which deprives you of the creative process, but allows you to play with a build that you would not put together yourself).
But alas, dozens of my ideas are broken on the rocks of reality. Looking back at the power graph, builds that don't use the most broken damage dealing and damage defense mechanics typically have a measly 15-40k ehp, and 0.5-2kk dps on a low budget. Gone are the days when it was enough to set up a cap resists, and find 40k armor, 50% block and 30% recoup so as not to die from 2 hits of white mobs on a clean t15 map. And even adding a 100% suppress chance, which is literally mandatory in the current game and provokes playing on the right side of the passive tree, does not save you from death if there is no mechanic that allows you to take damage. Of course it's a recovery. Instant recovery of 2k es from Aegis Aurora or 3k life regen from Pathfinder, and other sources of instant and fast recovery of ehp. What's the point of having 7k hp and any kind of damage reduction if after taking 1 hit from a rare monster you are left with 2k hp and the next hit is guaranteed to kill you? And now it's not 2.5.0, now you're getting 40+ hits per second.

As a result, there was no point in reforming defenses, buffing auras and adding a suppress, because the best mechanics of damage protection was "not taking damage" and having tens of millions dps.

And since we are talking about DPS, I wanted to ask:
Why are we back in 2.5.0, where poison through spells and summons was the most broken archetype?
Why is poison through a conditional Viper Strike or any attacks other than a tornado shot so weak?
Why stacking 4kk armor and getting 40kk dps from it is normal, but stacking 10k mana and getting 5kk dps from it is too much and needs to be nerfed? (Archmage)
Why is the iconic Fireball Ignite so much weaker than Vortex or Explosive Arrow? (Need for GMP, Pierce. And have still low damage)
Why once again poison builds have cap dps on uber bosses and require to remove the cap, and Essence Drain can gain 4-8kk dps only in ridiculous mirror glass builds?
Why is Omniscience literally the only way to upgrade an elemental build (other than the stack attribute)?
Why is it still possible to collect 8kkk dps of a trapper and oneshot uber bosses despite the reduction damage added in 3.9? (which was supposed to protect the bosses from such a one-shot, but, as a result, prevents everyone other)
And a lot of other questions that raise this iceberg of forgotten and unnecessary builds and archetypes to the surface, which are literally unplayable, although conceptually interesting, while once again stepping on the same rake, the balance team buffs the archetypes of poison, trappers, miners and omnistackers.

In case you forgot, I was talking about the power graph of the monsters and the player. In most cases, it turns out that you are weak at first, but eventually become stronger than the monsters = you can feel the growth of the character's strength. True, the border is very sharp, before and after, it completely changes the perception of the game from "I will be more careful or I will die" to "nothing will stop me." If earlier it was possible to go on par with him, and later outgrow him, now there are 2 ways: on a meta build you will always be above the power of the monsters, and on a non-met build you can never overcome this border.

Overall result: GGG complicate acts, nerf all support gems in the game (except trap mine support), add Archnemesis mods and various unpleasant map mods. All this in order to make the game more difficult, so that the player, overcoming difficulties, becomes better and stronger, and eventually outgrows the difficulty. But the realization, unfortunately, does not give such results, because you are either powerless in the face of the difficulty, or you have outgrown this difficulty. And of course, we don’t forget about those who from the very beginning do not experience difficulties from league to league, because no one cares about this.

Thesis: Despite the (false) variety of available skills, items, classes and archetypes, there are almost no builds in the game that are interesting to play from scratch and progress smoothly without resorting to the use of an overpower mechanic.