All of this is so true. and like you say it yourself "there's obviously more".
first of all the game by how it's been made in the first days wasnt a game aimed for competitive behavior.
nothing was balanced at all (remember tanks early bashes, reflectthemallwings...). you had a death counter in trials which made them very hard to deal with, making you wipe to learn, then master a boss, only to wipe more on the second, until you manage your way to reach then end boss which had you wipe even more.. Needless to talk about the Mantikora followed by that god damn brigde just to end on that filthy spearlauncher... yeah yeah.
Anyway, all of that was made in a mindset that do not fit at all with actual society nore combat team, nor economic models.
they'll miss all shots until they decide to work on what makes the game unable to fit their models:
-LA/HA coding
-movements
-(not so)smarthealing
-shared stats for dmg and heal
-latency disparities making ppl think other ppl cheats.
the politic they use by having things halfdone/undone/done/nerfed is just a way to keep players under a leech of hope.
the sad thing is that as far as i can tell: it works.
MMO's Stop being developed when the Servers are Shut down.
I think there's a difference between game development in an MMO and the constant wild pendulum swings we've gotten in ESO going back at least to the Morrowind chapter. The changes to combat in this patch aren't minor. Hopefully we'll get some good corrections in the Week 3 pts. Maybe this team will be able to get a solid base combat down sometime soon that they're happy with and just make minor tweaks in the future. Based on the previous history (of ESO combat development in general, not of this specific combat dev team) I'm not too optimistic about that though.