I prefer vcoh2 or close to that.
The original has clearer faction designs, distinctive abilities that have clearer leveling tiers, more asymmetrey, more rng unpredictable so every game is different.
I belive Relic just needs to tweak the original formula a bit more, instead of gutting the core design choices with black tapes. Their balancing is strange, this patch is supposed to work on certain units while others should not be touched.
I don't think you remember well what vcoh2 means.
Original design means, the only useful things are the ones which are broken OP and cheesy. You live and die by the meta, cause any deviation is insta 90% lose compare to todays meta, because faction can actually hold on it's own with non doctrinal stuff.
"Now it is everything goes, the engagement pace has picked up, too much arty, too much camping, more standardised meta to follow."
Games were defined in the first 7 mins by either FHT (stupid vet2) or T70 (which had crush).
Too much arty? What about turbomortar and precision strike on every single soviet piece. 120mm nuking your squads every 60s if you didn't move them? B4 nuking tanks with pinpoint accuracy? Did you play with old Joint Operations on 2v2+? You could fire LefH nonstop because the cooldown would refresh after it ended shooting up after vet2.
Camping is playing with/against Maxim spam. Having every freaking 2v2+ been Guard Motor/ISU152 vs Joint Operation/Elephant/I win pinning run.
After they somehow fixed vCoH2 factions, they broke the game again with WFA. I always found it funny that some of the people who complained about UKF simcity, weren't as vehement with OKW when 2v2+ was camping around forward medic HQ, ISG, using fortifications MG34 + pak43 into KT.
Sure this create balancing issues if you fall behind in tiering, but its make unit perservation fun, makes mastering a faction fun.
There was no such a thing as unit preservation with the amount of AoE wiping abilities.