It’s funny you mention class identity. We fought for it for a long time but it became obvious they don’t want to go that route. IMC is going for homogenization . If you look at the trends, the games that are lasting and are successful are the old school games with clear class distinctions (strengths and weaknesses). Most recent is WoW classic vs BFA.
Add to the “thesis” of “what is wrong” in ToS is the philosophy behind building class kits being “redundancy”. “Let’s make up to 7 skills that do the same thing but have a different animation”. This is compounded by the fact that “everything” is just dps so naturally the class combo with the highest skill factor combinations will win out. It shows in the re-rebalance of SF’s already. What’s the next major patch gonna be, the “Undo patch”?