You need to approach balance with a holistic view.
I believe when it comes to faction balance Relic is doing a decent job, sure it is not perfect and sure, they're slow to iterate but they do seem to listen and respond.
My largest concern is with the map balance, after years the map pool still has far too many low quality maps and maps which have not been retrofitted for the WFA expansion (panther on rails and metal, USF base pizza on langres) etc
I would rather play on a handful of well balanced maps than have 20 terrible ones.
COH2 is call of duty of RTS genere it is made for people who can not micro who have no skill who have no brain and only shit they should do is to grab some DLC and spam the fuck out of the game exactly like PE and brits were in COH1, two fucking stupid factions made for retards who could not learn the original game so they had to give them something super easy to boost the player base with casual players and get more money.
yep i have friends who were super noob in coh1 and they say coh2 is AWESOME compared to coh1 because they have so many chances to win in coh2 without usin micro and skill only blob the fuck out of the game and win. the PTRS patch was great example of how coh2 is awesome they wanted to sell that useless soviet commander so yea lets buff the PTRS and fuck up the game and get $$$$$$$$$$$$$$
call of duty is the most popular + selling game every year but does it mean it is a good game? the problem is casual players are always outnumbering competitive players, and by that i do not mean people who care about tournaments and shits like that, i mean people who want a game which you should LEARN it first then PRACTICE and then test your skill versus others and learn by LOSING.
CieZ i am surprised you are strategy specialist i did not know strategy even exists in coh2. it is like seeing someone in in CoD being "recoil specialist"
Lot's of competitive games have DLC, it is however just cosmetics.
Relic made a mistake with DLC commanders but these days they rarely make any difference to the game, most of the vanilla commanders are fine or better than the DLC ones and since commanders now drop from warspoils it isn't that much of a problem.
I don't think fixing vCOH would threaten COH2, they're not the same game.