Guild Wars 2 Forum - Profession Balance

I just don’t want to be playing rock paper scissors (lizard spock) as other people have described it.
When I feel a strong need to only worry about team comp because literally everything consists of hard counters and is thus a glorified overcomplicated version of the aforementioned game, I go play pokemon (and I do, there’s nothing wrong with some good pokemon).
I don’t think it’s as obvious that removing the vast majority of complexity from PvP is an amazing idea as you make it out to be, and I’m not even talking about builds here. There is a certain degree of expectancy in the game right now for players to be able to enter a fight and win, not because they happened to be the right class at the right time or through pure strategy, but because they’re actually better than the other people at playing the game, and your suggestion makes that much harder.
For example, as a staff ele with a horribly nontraditional build, I can 1v1 meta thieves. Sure it happens once a century, and I’m disadvantaged beyond what I would like, but at the same time I can be reasonably certain that if I found some magical way for me to practice having a thief attempt to surprise me (because let’s be honest here, 1v1ing a thief on a dueling server ignored half of why thieves are useful) I would eventually get to the point where I could catch thieves trying to murder me and reverse the situation much more reliably. Reducing everything to hardcounters removes that kind of skill, and doesn’t particularly appeal to me.