I get wanting to attempt to balance subclassing, but all you're essentially doing is making pure classes even more of a problem to play. I don't even think the combat team plays this game anymore, as they're seemingly just consolidating all of everything unique and pushing everything to eventually be the same, just so they don't have to properly balance anything. "If everything is the same, why try at all? We could just coast our way to maintenence mode, and then be completely fine with dev time! Easy pay and leisure time!!" is essentially what ZoS is saying here in terms of balancing. This started with Hybridization.

Gutting uniquely made class additions on skills doesn't even make sense to me, because moving everything over to the major/minor buff system seems pretty immaterial when you already have made many skills/sets do those exact same things. What is the point of using some skills over others when they are all eventually going to give the same major minor buffs? You're essentially just putting the final nail in the coffin to diversity(if there was any left after update 35 anyways). You want everyone to play the game the same way, this is evident by how you're treating subclassing. You're saying you don't want people to play pure classes anymore, and are pidgeonholeding most people who want to do harder content into an even smaller cone. This is what you have been doing, and it's the wrong philosophy, sorry to not be with the in crowd here but I think you deserve the constant criticism. You don't understand how the game works, evident when you don't understand even what upward momentum is when you're training or farming for builds. You don't understand your own crowd.

Why not try and bring up other classes with unique buffs and passives instead of removing the unique buffs and passives in the first place? I think you should go in the opposite direction than consolidation. Make more unique and diverse buffs so people choose another skill to slot over Grim Focus, instead of just nerfing grim focus.

PS: Usually MMOs understand there will always be a meta, and although they tweak things to come up to the same level as everything else, ZoS seems to think that the meta should just be one singular thing, instead of multiple paths.This is just blatantly incorrect.