Shadow Fang was a combo action in early ShB as well (2 hit combo from Spinning Edge instead of 3 hit in SB), but they removed it and made it a separate GCD entirely because it didn't play well with a standard rotation on different Skill Speeds. It was the same deal with late SHB when they made it its own GCD, but again, it played weird with SKS and was just removed. Raiju imo fills the niche for a new GCD while adding utility and job identity. Given situations where you have to move out of AOEs during your burst window, the flexibility of being able to align my Raitons to disengage and stack my Raijus to reengage feels stellar, especially when paired with Shukuchi. Imo, it's by far the most compelling reason for myself to play NIN, and honestly, I hope they add more Ninjutsu-> Melee action combos in the future. I'd love to see Katon or Phantom finishers, or even another combo action from Raiju again (just.... not the forced gap closer crap).

The Huton timer is barely a noticeable change. Decent NIN players never drop Huton, and it's just ten less generous seconds. Honestly, I thought people would think that's a good change cause it "makes the class harder", idk. Is your argument that Huton should be extended due to one particular fight cutscene, and it ruins the job because of that cutscene? We literally have Huraijin for situations like that. Not saying optimizing a fight and squeezing every bit of potency out isn't fun, but it's so strange to me to see people complain about a loss of 10, 15 potency sometimes just because a number isn't tweaked exactly as they like.

Point is people have their subjective opinions about what they want out of a job. There is clearly intent for the developers to make jobs more fun, and while you (and I) may not agree with every decision they make, someone will like it, and someone won't. That's the way it works. People on the forums do not represent the majority of players - this is clear in the fact that many of the same players on the forums post their opinions in different threads. Yoshi P and team probably honestly gain more valuable feedback (or at least is more attentive of said feedback) from live letter Twitch/YT comments, streamers, and media tours than the forums.

[2/2]