Not nearly as important as you think. For literally 99% of the player base, OWL was about as relevant as the price of tea in china.
Overwatch was always significantly worse off because of OWL. Ordinarily, a game becomes an esport naturally. This wasn’t the case with Overwatch. Activision Blizzard seen the growing esports scene and tried to shoehorn themselves into the market thinking it would generate massive profit.
Supposed to. It failed at that.
Yes. Queue times were a separate problem, and a result of population imbalance between roles.
You don’t seem to understand something here. Role Queue was inevitable, regardless of GOATS, and Brig. It was always going to be added to the game at some point. From a balance standpoint, the game was far more difficult to balance due to the chaotic nature of open queue.
Again, and I’m going to emphasise it this time, Competitive Play is not the be-all end-all for overall enjoyment of the game. I already pointed out how it was less common in competitive play, but was quite prevalent in QP. As was revealed recently, the majority just didn’t care for Competitive Play until the Season 9 overhaul. Many were content with QP.
It’s not because they failed to fix their earlier sledgehammer mistake. Brigitte was a necessary evil, like it or not. Role Queue was created because it was easier to balance the game around having two of each role. Tank synergy played a large factor in the introduction of Role Queue.
Because once you’re at that skill level, unorthodox compositions and risky playstyles become far easier to punish.
And yet both of these heroes are still strong. Ana especially benefited from role queue as now she’s guaranteed to not be the only support being targeted in a dive meta. If you stopped playing them because of the shift to role queue, then that just indicates that you’re the kind of player who prefers to main dps, but flex to what’s needed at the time.
Not really. Support has never really been a massively popular role. The main purpose of the support role is to enable their teammates to make plays, while rarely making plays themselves.
As for why Tank was unpopular, I think this will clear that up.
Role queue was always going to be a necessary addition, and the introduction of Brig and GOATS only hastened its arrival.