So excited to play new update, however...

"Fine tune ranked" in what way? Or ways?

There's no incentive to go for placement at all. It makes far more sense to just go for fights the entire game due to KP being rewarded heavily over placement.

This is making ranked feel very much like pubs because nobody's playing for placement at all. Everyone just guns for KP and when round 4 and 5 come around, there's like 3 teams and it's a snooze fest. There's no more glorious end game with 10 teams alive like there was last season when we were on ED and other good maps. 

Not a ranked player here, so no skin in the game (as they say), but I definitely remember a pretty epic hue and cry whichever season it was that they gave almost no points for kills and placement was everything. That dragged on for a couple of seasons and I'm not saying it coincided with population declines because those are inevitable in older games, but it was a real problem for a lot of people. They called it the rat's season.

I just can't understand why it's so hard for the developer to find that middle ground where everybody feels like their contribution or play style has relevance.

Also: in what way is King's Canyon disappointing?

Yeah, I'd agree that's what everyone wants, the season you're talking about is 17, I think. There was an insane amount of people in master's just based on placement. I think a lot of people agree that there needs to be a middle ground between what we have now and that. 

For Kings Canyon, here are my main issues:

• It feels stale since it's been in the game since day one.
• Since the maps so small, 3rd parties are a guarantee in every fight. So, a fight cannot be more than 20s or else both squads are guaranteed to die.
• It's really hard to survive because there's an extreme lack of cover. 
• The end games are lame because it's so hard to survive due to the reasons above. There are usually 3 teams in round 5. 
• The landscape makes survivability impossible because of the numerous craters throughout the map. There are areas near like 5 poi's (for example, The Cage) where you can get shot from every neighboring building, hill, etc. These areas are impossible to ignore during rotates most times. 

The problem was  not entirely S17, it was  the combination with S18 (which was the best ranked season imho).
Fake Master players thought they would just rock it again and were presented with a hard task climbing even out of Silver, thus they abandoned the game.
Since then kills got more weight by the season, and as a result they have perverted the battle royal into smth nobody likes anymore , especially due to the new TTK. 
But thats a typical Respawn thought process, the original Devs would have never let it come that far ... it has a reason why most of them jumped ship and you can feel that since Season 6 ...
But hey, they are listening to "us" , thats why we got that stupid TTK, no fundamental changes to the Matchmaking, no inputbased lobbies, no quality server code, cheaters on end,  ect.

i took a look at the latest numbers from apex.tracker.gg, and it looks horrible.
Last Split the numbers went up  from 500K to a 1 Mio players, due to the new season and the "promised" updates.
Roughly 25% of the Ranked Playerbase finished the split in Diamond and above and most of them got reset into plat for this split. 
Now take a look at the new chart :

around 600K of mostly rookie to gold players dont play this split ...
Thank you Respawn, you really listened to what the Players wanted ... 

Yeah I gotta say I liked the healing that the support class got last season, I felt like I wasn't spending nearly as much time healing. I could get back into the fight right away and defend against a 3rd party. I felt like a juggernaut on Newcastle!

I think that if they nerfed the double healing to like 1.5x healing for small meds, I think that would be balanced. With the updated to Skirmisher and Assault, that would make sense. 

Sorry, back to ranked, if they rewarded placement more then the endgames would be far better. I think we'd also see teams with slightly worse mechanics be able to climb the ranks because of positioning and strategy. The only way to rank up substantially is if everyone on your team has pro level aim, it feels like warzone. 

I'm a little off topic here, but I had to say something about the following:

"we'd also see teams with slightly worse mechanics be able to climb the ranks because of positioning and strategy."

This to me completely sums up the mindset of most developers and all gamers. It says to me that the game is at its core all about aiming. All shooters are all about aiming. A "good" player is a player with good aim, no matter how lacking in game sense they may be. And it's true that good aim will get you a lot higher up the ladder than positioning and strategy. The problem from my perspective is that you can't fake game sense. There is no game sense cheat. Aim, on the other hand, is the number one cheat in any shooter. And in this game I don't think any knowledgable player can escape the reality that there are cheaters in a lot of low-level matches, and they're half the lobby in high-level matches. Half? Did I say "half?"

This is why shooter devs would do better to focus the game on brain power and game knowledge rather than on mechanics for which there exist the easiest, most readily available cheats in the universe. Remove recoil from the game tomorrow and you put Xim out of business on the same day. We could have a discussion along the same lines about aim assist but I'm sure a handful of sweaty "professionals" would rather have a hysterical YouTube meltdown than admit that cheaters now own the world, and that if you want to beat them then you have to do the moral equivalent of handing out their cheats to everyone else for free.

Food for thought.

I didn’t even think about how removing all the recoil would substantially help the cheating issue. Games like warzone where the TTK is next level fast allows cheaters to run through lobbies.

the more apex becomes strictly aim dependent, the more like warzone it becomes.

making more abilities where its easier to help ur team survive and incentiving placement would solve so many core issues.