Thanks for taking the time to do all these responses. A lot of this makes sense, but I'm struggling to see how it applies to one part: Vlad.
Vladimir has never, to my knowledge, been a strong card. Forget 9/10, forget 5/10, he's been around a 3/10 max in all the time I've seen him. So where does he fit in to rotation, so much that he's one of the first to be rotated?
Sure thing. Vlad's problems are diving into a whole other wrinkle in all this, the tension of power related to region identity goals for standard vs more fluid region identity in eternal. Vlad's mechanical identity is awkward for our current vision for his region in standard and making him strong would cause problems within standard for that reason. Rotating him means we could buff him without causing problems to standard's region identity divisions.
Basically, Vlad isn't being rotated because he's too powerful. He's being rotated because making him strong would mess with region identity in his current design. We're interested in finding a new version for him (as discussed in part 1 of the article).