I've also heard the theory, "Bright Throat's Boast and Bone Pirate were too strong so instead of fixing those two sets, they nerfed all drinks into oblivion."

Edit for clarification: This is from PvE perspective primarily.

At this point I believe it's mainly an issue of the inability to balance max resources vs. regen.

There's very few scenarios where you'd want regen MORE than you'd want max resources.

This is because of the ongoing balancing problem of "Damage is King" 99 times out of 100.

If max resource (food) gives you more damage, but a comparable ability to use skills, then why would anyone choose pure restore?

Regen is also hampered made less important by the current "chug potions nonstop meta" where top end gameplay rewards always having potion buffs active. Potions tend to give a chunk of at least one resource plus a hefty resource regen. Stacking regen on top of regen is almost redundant -- so use food for higher max and more damage.

There are useful drinks. But they tend to be hybrid special recipes that gives some stats also.

EDIT: And for health, it's very simply this: No amount of Health Regen keeps you from dying to attacks equal to or greater than your max HP value. So better to raise your max value and stay alive, dealing with health restore later through self heals or other party members.

To attempt to understand food power budget, we can look at max-level base game foods. I’ll speak in terms of single resource, and often use Magicka for easy comparisons, but the same applies to stamina with equal values, or health with a 10% increase. I’ll also keep this independent of the max resource/resource regen split mentioned above, but that would have to be considered if any other foods are rebalanced.

Green: 6048 single resource (6048 total)
Blue: 4936 double resource (9872 total)
Purple: 4105 triple resource (12315 total)
Gold: No established baseline, every special example different (more on this later)

So already we can see that increased food quality means more total stats given, but less of each individual stat. It’s still debatable if combat effectiveness is intended to increase through each food tier. I’d say yes, because the tri-stat purple foods offer more than half the value of each stat that green food offers, and the established balance for tri-stat is a ratio of 2:1 (seen in triune trait and prismatic armor glyphs). In fact it’s easy to point out that standard purple foods are 4105 / (0.5 x 6048) = 36% better than green food.

We can do a similar comparison for blue bistat food, but the only tool for comparison is Shacklebreaker set, which shows that 2065 bistat resource is equal to the 2550 on single stat sets. This means that blue food is giving 4936 x 2550 / 2065 = <1% more stat density than green food. This is interesting because it aligns more with the dev comment yesterday about Pickled Fish Bowl, where the color/quality/tier should not affect its combat effectiveness.

So which is it? Is there a hierarchy? Or are all qualities of food equal? The answer gets complicated because if you’re looking at tri-stat food like Longfin Pasty with Melon Sauce the hierarchy applies, but when you look at food with stats that align with an effective build, like Witchmother’s Brew, that 36% increase in stat density is not found. Instead Witchmothers gives 3 stat bonuses equivalent to 2856 Magicka. If this were a food, I assume it would be closer to 3060 Magicka, which means that even in terms of total stats it is weaker than Blue bistat food. There’s no scenario where this phenomenon makes sense, Purple consumables split across 3 stats should never have lower total stat density than Blue consumables split across two. Dubious Camoran has the same issue, there must have been a glitch in the spreadsheet the day these were nerfed.

Now to look at Gold food. These are difficult to define, but we can use a few different examples:

Sugar Skulls imply quad-stat 4250 resource (total 17000). This is ridiculous mathematically because it’s more of each stat than tri-stat food gives, and everything we’ve seen so far shows that the more stats are in a consumable, the lower each one gets, despite the total stat density increasing. Then again, many players believe that Gold food should be better than alternatives, and that the Health Recovery on Sugar Skulls is nearly-useless, so the expense buys a small stat increase over Purple food. I don’t know which viewpoint is correct here.

Clockwork Citrus Filet implies quad-stat 3080 resource (total 12320). This seems low because the total stat density is barely more than Purple tri-stat, and spreading it across a 4th stat like health recovery obviously dilutes the more useful lines. In terms of combat effectiveness, CCF ends up very similar to WPB or DCT if they existed as foods. Maybe that’s the intent, for purple and gold foods to perform the same in combat, but I’m sure it’s not the intent for Purple and Gold to both be objectively worse than Blue food for combat. Artaeum Takeaway Broth faces the same problems.

Orzoga’s Smoked Bear Haunch implies 3920 quad-stat resource (15680 total). This is probably a more reasonable power budget for gold food than the previous two examples. It continues the pattern that Green, Blue and Purple foods established, where adding an additional resource means slightly less of each resource, but a few thousand more resources overall. The problem here is that Orzoga’s stats are split between such diverse things that I can’t really justify using it as a combat baseline for other foods. It may be sensible to bring Orzoga’s total stat density up to meet Sugar Skulls, while bringing Clockwork Citrus and Takeaway Broth up to where Orzoga’s is currently.