I appreciate your enthusiasm, and in some respects I even share it. But one thing in your post stood out to me:
"The game literally makes you feel like you're either the predator chasing your prey, Or you are the prey being hunted down."
To me this is an almost perfect sum up of one of the biggest problems that plagues shooters. All shooters, not just this one. It's that inevitable binary of "you're on top or you're being sat on." There's almost never anything in between. I've played this game since launch and I can count on two hands the number of engagements (not matches, not seasons, ENGAGEMENTS) where I felt subjectively that it could go either way. The number of engagements where it was going one way and the losers managed to turn it around... I need even fewer fingers to count those. Nope, I can tell now almost as soon as the first bullets are fired which way things will go. Which is why I play a mobility legend. If anything seems off, and I mean anything at all, then I'm out. Off to some other dust up. Often leaving my hapless squadmates to their doom. They never understand that they were doomed long before I abandoned them.
This all adds up to a situation where I no longer feel like an engagement is testing my skill. It's testing the game-play mechanism. And it always works out the way I think it will. My ability to determine outcomes based on nothing more than my squadmates' banners in the lobby... is shockingly high. The first few seconds of engagement almost always confirms the determination. That's a level of predictability that any game should seek to avoid. It's a replayability killer. I know: ironic from the day-one player who still plays every day. But there's a difference between sticking with something because you love it and sticking with something because nothing else is any better.
And this isn't the only example of the predictability creep in this game. It's the best (or worst, depending on your point of view), but you also have the utterly predictable mechanism of shield buffing, and the utterly predictable mechanism of weapon buffing. All these things used to have an element of unpredictability to them. Early seasons a guy could be a terrible player but still pull one out because he got lucky with a gun or a shield. Now, by the time you get to the final five everyone has the same gold-tier weapons and 225 point shield. Predictable. Boring. Even worse, if you get there and you don't have any of those things then you already know you've lost. Why would you even bother making an effort? Knowing you've lost because you're not good enough is one thing. Knowing you've lost because you didn't follow the procedures, the same dull procedures that you have to follow in every match, is just plain yawn-inducing. It's possible to get to the first circle, know that you've spent too much time respawning your teammates and not enough time evo-ing up or looting... and just quit and re-queue. The only reason more people don't do this like I do this, I have to think, is because they're just not yet aware of the repetitive and predictable nature of the gameplay because they haven't played enough. That, or for them the gunplay is so star-spangled awesome that they're willing to look the other way on almost anything else.
Respawn: maybe season 25 mechanics are better for some than the old season 5 mechanics, but when I think about the population then and the population now, I have to think that many features of this game have not evolved for the better. Maybe a little less attention to the whims of the streamers. Just because someone is good AT the game doesn't mean they know what's good FOR the game.
Oh, and get the live players out of bots. They have no business there. That's what pubs is for.
