Don't forget that it took the community itself a few months to formulate the present views on PLD post-HW. If you look back to the first couple of months of posts, PLD was clearly meant to be the best MT, Sheltron was supposedly the second-coming of Inner Beast, and there was a 30+ page thread on how DRK obviously wasn't good enough to bring into Ex Primals. It took two world-first clears on something other than a PLD MT to turn that all on its head. That's also when we suddenly decided that the existing two-year-old tank 'meta' was actually an issue.

You can design and balance classes on paper all you want, but you can't design for how people will come to play or perceive them.