Whether or not you enjoy it has literally no relevance to any point in my argument, so I'm not exactly sure why you brought it up. I would consider it to be nearly axiomatic that all other things equal, more experience would make one player better than another player. And since with you all other things are equal when compared to yourself, you with hundreds of hours of practice to rise to master (if you chose to do so) would have more knowledge of the game than you in your current state.
The professional community outpacing the development team is something that happens in every single competitive environment. If you don't understand that, no, you don't really watch that many dev videos. You saw it in WoW all the time with the dev team and community team being steamrolled by top competitive players (and then respond by having fun with the game code).I mean, there's a lot to read here, but...it's still assumptions that I don't already watch these things, and follow it.
I do not particularly enjoy retreading arguments I have already made. If you want to know my response to this, read my previous post more carefully, as I have already fully accounted for yours.And they already said flat out while Roadhog was nerfed, it wasn't just because they didn't take into account landing hook after hook, it was because he felt bad to be yanked around corners, and his hook felt unfair.
Notice his one shot wasn't nerf immediately until people kept rallying about "getting it removed", much like they are Mercy right now.
The skill is mechanics, game sense, knowledge, strategy, how to work as a team, how to read your opponents, ensuring that your activities are objective driven and not focused on outcomes irrelevant to the win/lose/draw condition of the game like gathering gold medals, and other such factors. Many of which you need to actually play and experience first hand to get an innate sense of. It seems you are saying that the only difference between someone who reads a lot of guides and a GM is mechanical skills. I absolutely disagree with this, and anyone who has risen the ranks in any competitive game is going to disagree as well.There's nothing odd about it. It's a statement of fact, nothing about "being good" means you don't have the knowledge of the game. You claim the professional community "outstrips the skill", but yet again, the skill is not just the knowledge. And even then, it's completely irrelevant to THIS specific situation, because what you're talking about is the type of players who are in a private discord with the Overwatch crew, giving suggestions and feedback, AKA the pro teams.
It's not anyone on this site, that's for sure, nor is it going to be the casual forum goer in general. So it's perfectly reasonable considering the situation here to say "Ranking doesn't matter" when it comes to knowledge of the game. And I really don't see the point to try to stick up for people trying to smother opinions by saying "lol you're bronze" even when it's completely false.
And yes, Jeff's knowledge of the game does matter, he can't be some useless robot that just accepts what any pro player comes to him about, otherwise he'd just be fired and replaced with said pro player. He has to be able to pick and choose what complaints are valid, and compare that to what information he has, and come to a conclusion based on that.
As for managers needing to have a high level of knowledge of the game.. this simply isn't how management works. He has to have some baseline knowledge, yes, but when you go out into the real world and look at the highest levels of management, even for extremely effective companies, the managers are not there because they are the technical experts. They're there because they are in charge of the technical experts. If I were the president and I found out that Kaplan was spending his time learning each hero in depth by playing them for hours a day, I would be pulling him aside to address priorities because he's being paid to manage the team.
If you aren't overall familiar with how a successful manager fits into a team, I strongly suggest you read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lyncioni. It's a very short read, but it outlines how management works in a pretty relateable format that fits into how large teams actually work in the real world quite nicely. Because it honestly feels like you don't have the foundation of knowledge for what exactly Kaplan's job is and how it fits into the Blizzard team.