Aero
Really good summary of the state of things. Unfortunately, what you've said about games being decided at the deck-building stage is far too accurate for me to call it a good game at the moment. You can sure bring whatever you want to the table, but the tiered power levels of the game means that anything non-meta will lose to anything meta. Most modern decks seem to have starters that translate to +20 card advantage combos, and recover from total board wipes as if nothing happened. Every now and then you can sorta snipe out a win or two with staple handtraps, board-breakers, or those 'cheat' cards you mentioned but I think all of that is pretty dishonorable. It's all basically code for: "I can't compete unless I prevent you from competing".
Back in my day, Solemn Judgement was a serious sacrifice that most people did not want to pay the price for.
I was a Yugiboomer (quit before GX came out) but came back to play when Master Duel was released on Steam and the transition has been rough to say the least. The best analogy I've been able to come up is that it's like coming back to a game of Chess after 20 years and seeing that the official rules have changed. There's 45 new pieces, you can play on the under-side, the Bishop is banned, and everyone laughs at you if you play the Queen.
Learning the new rules is about 5% of the process, because learning what cards do what, and how to best use them is a 10,000 hour project. I still regularly come up against decks I don't understand the gameplan for. In a way I really like that about the game, "oh damn, what does Evil Eye do?", but you're also really incentivized to not sit and read opponent cards because of timers, and sometimes extremely oblique rulings. Negating activation and negating effect are two completely different things, see. Better to just lose the duel and memorize the weak points of every deck.
There's a lot of problems with the game as a whole, and I think more erratas and conditional banlists would do some good, but I think the ultimate solution would be:
Comprehensive Formal Rating for Cards or Decks
Right now there is nothing stopping someone from bringing their cool Watt deck to locals or to Master Duel's Silver and running up against Primite Blue Eyes; "Go ahead Aliens bro, you decide if you wanna go first."
This situation should absolutely never happen because it means that fun pet-decks get deleted and literal pay-to-win decks don't see fair competition. If you are going to play Malice your opponents should exclusively be Ryzeal, Kash, Fiendsmith sloppa, and Ishizu Tearlaments.
How do you do that? Give a competitive rating to every single card. This will be an absolute bitch to balance, but Master Duel in particular already has a ton of back-end analytics to help with this. Devs already know the play-rate, win rate, finisher rate etc of every single card, and that's an excellent start. As a hypothetical: something like Havnis could score something like 50 points, but your Doodle Stego is maybe at 4. At the end, your meta deck looks like it has a score of 2130 and your bizarro rogue deck is at 1239. Rather than having decks compete on a ladder where that 2130 shows up to pubstomp Bronze, make it so that it can only be played in brackets, <2250, <2500, <3000, and Unlimited. If brackets have maximums but no minimums, there's incentive to make your deck either weaker to sneak into a lower bracket, or stronger to match the competition of your current bracket. It also means that lower brackets see a greater variety of decks, and high brackets see higher levels of play. It would also mean that GOAT format wouldn't have to be segregated. They could be selectively using or go up against modern cards because they almost exclusively sit in the <200, <500, <750, and <1000 brackets. You could also onboard new players with very simple <200 decks like what you fight against in the Master Duel tutorials.
Just spitballing here, but you could potentially also use this system to completely avoid the banlist. Just give banned cards like Pot of Greed extremely high scores (like 250). This also opens the door for some pretty crazy rogue decks that can dodge the banlist. If you decide your deck is going to triple down on equip spells and not play any hand traps- why not let you have 3 pot of desires? As an additional benefit this also lets you print crazier anime-esque cards at that add 500 points to your deck or whatever.
Anyways, bad game, I hate it, fuck Sky Strikers in particular.
Gonna go play some more of the duel triangle event now.
