I was not responding to you directly and did refer to the ‘pants down’ approach seen in the other threads. Sometimes it is difficult to avoid when your pants are already down due to the design of civilisations.
I come from all the games save aoe1. Probably played aoe2 the most by quite a margin. All factors need to be taken into account when looking at a balance issue, which is difficult if players cannot admit to any bias. We will have to see how the make everything strong approach actually develops but we can see that they will not avoid nerfing something in particular that is negatively affecting the meta such as springalds.