Not at all; I'm always open to discussion. I just can't endorse the use of BRs as they stand at this current point in time, and a lot of that has to do with how disgusted I am with the interface.

However, if you're doing a BR with random melee -> random archers -> mages, I definitely can't see how that would even come close to just pure DPS uptime. I know the notion of knocking off a huge chunk of HP is extremely attractive, and I was one of the original proponents of using advanced BRs in my linkshell back when parties were 15-man, allowing for a lot of leeway to form the golden 8.

I feel though that 1.18 is such a different beast, and while you may feel or observe greater damage, I encourage you to test a fight like Deepvoid Slave with and without BRs using the same party composition, strategy, gear, food buffs, etc., i.e. try to control as many random factors as possible. At best we were getting it down in about the same time with BRs, and BRs have a built-in liability of forcing player inaction. At worst it was significantly slower (30 seconds or more for a kill).

All that being said, if BRs work for you, then there is no reason for you to really abandon them. I also used to self-buff with Cadence on solo BRs, but here I'm going to refer, again, to how poorly buffs perform when applied to WSs vs applied to Light Shot. The only WS I really consider buffing now is Barrage (Hawk's Eye on Bloodletter sometimes), and my use of Barrage is not frequent enough to justify the action points spent on inserting Cadence into a loadout that I'm going to use for an entire DH run. Like I mentioned in the guide itself, there's a lot of room for improvement in terms of min/maxing any given loadout, and most of it is going to come down to a number of personal factors.