It’s a bit of everything, good players will still read some kind of guides and/or do their own research with available tools. Reducing it to all players that follow the meta don’t know what they’re doing is a very bias point of view.
So you want people to take the covenants that is best most of the time? Which is the sword? It’s not really that big of difference in the end. That’s still min/maxing. There will be flavors of the month even then.
You’re just trying to give another way of illusion of choice. No matter good players in the current system will have multiple characters, because they can do that in this setting.