Iron Will: The Design and their Critics

Background:
Poe1 Player since 2013, playing exclusively Iron Will builds since 2014.

Power-fantasy:
Be a close-up caster relying on (preferably life based) tankiness & recovery to brute force encounters.

IW in PoE1
Just "normal", "fair" Iron Will builds have been basically dead (or at least in a vegetative state) in PoE1 for years.
Just getting a bunch of damage and life on a caster hasnt been cutting it for a long time.
Almost all uses of Iron Will in the last few years depend on other broken interactions (Manastacking with Shapers Touch, Replica Alberon) that have IW just as a sidebonus, not as its sole foundation.
Basically stat-stacking only get's popular if you get flat damage in some form with it.

Current Problems:
Iron Will is not on the tree
While it wasn't on the tree in PoE1 either, at least it was on a support gem and later on a non-crucial item.
Iron Will cannot be (only) on a gem, due to the "Limited to 1" restriction
Given how we seem to be expected to have a skill rotation/skills for various situation, gearing your whole build towards just makin one of those deal damage seems to me a non-starter.
Iron Will is bound only to a low-level unique that has no other stats
While this in itself is no problem (played old Repentance from 2.1.0 (2015) to 3.16.0 (2021)), it IS a problem that it's on the chest slot.
Currently the chest slot is 50% (chest+amulet) of your regular slots (exluding scepters, as their mod-pool does not have a synergetic modpool) one can dedicate to spirit, if the build is required to have lots of it.
While that might have been intended previously, with the immediate toning down of trigger skills I dont think it's worth placing that restriction on possible future builds anymore.
Attribute requirements of skills are too high
This hits not only IW, but basically any ascendancies try to off-class hard.
While it's theoretically possible to get all the 200 INT needed for lvl 20 spells from travel nodes, that would be 40 travel nodes or a full third of all your passives.
This might place some restrictions on non-IW off-classers (one affix on ~4 slots HAS to have that attribute), this is in my opinion far too prohibitive, due to any possibility to fix the missing resistances on the tree early on
(This also goes into runes & sockets which I won't discuss here).
If you actually try to get the INT for the gems on tree, there will be no passives left to actually get some strength to benefit from IW.
There are no big off-attributes in start area
While the changeable travel nodes are nice and all, if you want to off-class you have to spec ALL the travel nodes to match whatever gem you wanna be using.
I'd like to see something like Versatility or Practical Application from PoE1.
Iron Will currently has prohibitive drawback
Basically the biggest reason IW is completely dead right now.
While I understand the reasoning of removing flat life from STR, not only kills that the power fantasy, it also makes leveling with IW impossible.
While "pure" IW hasn't been "good" in years, at least you could level with it immediatly (thanks to it being on the tree). While leveling, while you might not have damage, at least you were tanky.
In PoE2, if you actually go for IW, you immediatly half your lifepool for less damage than you get in whatever cluster is in your starting area.
Even in endgame, you are forced to do all the meta shit every other caster does (ES, MoM, ES + EB + MoM) just to have SOME survivability.
And if you go that route, the build is strictly worse than any other alternative that does that.

TLDR:
Currently Iron Will is a trap that died for the sins of flat damage attribute stackers.

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