This thread represents the real problem about AST: the people who play it. Players taking things as gospel and assuming some cards are only good to use in specific situations makes me think the devs are rolling their eyes to every thread they see.
The Spear is not bad and the RR effect was not nerfed. Expanded RR was transferred from The Arrow/The Spear to The Spire/The Ewer. There's a reason for that: during combat, transforming any card on an AoE may not be the best choice. The Balance, for example, loses value if you use them on DPS who are not on their burst rotations, so instead of Expanding it to a whole party on their low-dps rotation you should consider Extending it to use on a DPS that is bursting. Before they transferred the RR effect, you needed to burn The Spire/The Ewer to do that, and those two cards are very valuable to use during raids, specially for progression; now you can burn the Spear (which is less valuable than those cards) to get the most useful effect.