I have posted my views on this topic before here and little has changed in my view. At least on the Xerox side of the coin. My bugbear now is that Wizards is focusing on MTGO when they make their choices and not Vintage as a whole. Regardless of if you feel Thorn was or was not the more powerful card (it was), it was the wrong choice to take over Sphere because of the devastation it created on paper Vintage. I would have rather seen two cards taken from shops to leave unpowered and White Eldrazi untouched. But since unpowered decks are not really an issue on MTGO, these disccusions are not given the prominence they deserve.
So I have no faith any more that the right choice can be made for a meta health perspective. Should MM have gone years ago? Yes. Will it ever go? Probably not. Just keep going down this path of 4 MM, a few Flusterstorm and some REB while bitching all is bad in the world when a Sphere hits. Its fine, Randy will back you up, say Tomb is the real issue here and regardless of if its required or not your pile of Blue will not be touched. At lest you know that no one without a house deposit in cards will ever challenge you in paper again, you know, since we don't need to take those plebs in mind when the B/R choices are made. Save for those fools who show up with Dredge, but since you do not have to worry about Shops hate in the side they are all going to get dumped on from a great height.
On the plus side, when people like myself sell out if they kill Shops at least you will have new people buying my power. People that don't know what it was like before your 90% Blue meta who are happy with the MM, Fluster, REB situation. God knows I'm not sticking around for it. I deal with that BS enough in Legacy thank you very much.
And I do honestly think that regardless of what you or I say ned, we are at the end of the road. I just, I don't see how this train is stopped now. I think its game over for Shops because it's an Emotional issue on both sides. People like me want to play Prison, people like Randy want to play Xerox and see me as anathema to their very idea of fun. Sadly I never worked for RnD, so my views don't mean shit.
That's not to say that Shops is something that should remain untouched, I know sometimes things need to be dealt with. I am just pissed that the issue of Blast, MM and FS taking up 7 to 9 slots of a bunch of Mains is something my deck has to get hit for. Feels like your punishing the wrong crew for dealing best with a situation outside of their control.
Edit:
Someone said it far better than I did here.
As far as the actual opinion, David (Shops @ 20 of the meta) is consistently beating Goliath (Blue @ 70% of the meta) and you are complaining that Goliath's job is too hard. It is absolutely stunning to me that so many people take this position. Blue decks are dogs to shop G1, then have to win G3 from the draw. Take a deck with some Wastelands, Ancient Grudges, and Deathrites to bear and suddenly you are winning G1 and they have to steal back G3 on the draw. But instead everyone complains until they restrict more shop cards and we pump those blue numbers up over 80%. Breaking Force of Will decks down into 7 archetypes has been necessary for so long that we just accept it. We see Shops at 20% and 3 Blue variants at 18% and complain that Shops has an unfair chunk of the meta. It doesn't. This is akin to saying that we should ban Forest because Affinity isn't winning more than 55% vs Mono Green Hate. The success of the hate deck is predicated on the success of its prey. Let's push back these greedy Blue decks that have to cannibalize each other in order to survive instead of cutting out everything else until we are looking at mono-Blue deck vintage with varied colors splashed.