*snip*
Well, now you are at least explaining your point of view. Defenders are a solution to squishy units, which doesn't defeat the purpose of having orders, but rather introduce more ways to let units with order thrive, which, in turn, creates new threats that might need to be dealt with. Trying to find balance is key and it's also one of the most difficult aspects. Now, you have lock and purify mechanics as alternative ways to deal with threats (instead of removing them). With defenders, there is more reason to use the existing purify mechanic.
For example, the old Clear Skies was a bad design because it only worked against weather. Purify is a better design because it works against a lot more. However, that doesn't mean it should become a counter to everything. That's why there are also locks. This is the balance the devs need to find, the number of threats and the available counters. As such, within the current game, defenders are fine. The problems lay elsewhere.
Let's take ST and your first sentence. There's not much "squishy" about 2 x dwarfs with 5 armour each and 1 ping per round, easily strengthened by cheap armour boost cards. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but lock doesn't do anything to a defender? So all that's happened is the devs have made purify cards necessary, which is then just a counter to be played at a specific time against a specific card if you get the deal in the specific order. Too much RNG again. There is definitely something fundamentally wrong with cards dedicated to countering other cards. Usurper is the most extreme example, but simply shouldn't exist - leader abilities are a key part of Gwent, almost fundamentally important, and the inclusion of one leader that hard-counters your own leader ability is madness.
Clear skies is another good example of this "designed to counter" problem in Gwent. Instead of having cards that each have interesting summon, spawn or copy abilities - which are much more interesting - we have a massive amount of "this card will deliberately crap on that deck", which is also just plain wrong. Remember when unitless was a thing, and everybody just played White Frost FTW!
There's also no place or need for anyone to be able to play two proper cards in one turn - Roche, any leader that plays or replays a card. Vilgefortz is a better example of a good card design. It can be disruptive, or it can be a disaster, but that's the risk. Yenn Invocation is a terrible design, because it specifically hurts most Monster decks and Skellige - Second Wind. There really should be an effort to look through all cards and think "if it's more powerful, almost OP, against a particular deck, it should be changed". Some of these cards effectively mean auto-win. There's multiple examples listed above. You could also argue far more cards, particularly Gold, need dual purpose around things like unlock and purify (seriously, three unlock cards in the entire deck?). How about anti-seize? Barricade, for example, should mean a unit cannot be seized. How the hell are you "barricaded", yet seizable?! Makes NO sense!!
I don't think it would take a development team much effort to go through this step by step:
1) Replace all leader "card draw" abilities with more interesting design.
2) Remove all "draw another card" cards from the deck.
3) Add more dual purpose to currently bad cards (Lambert, Morvudd, Phoenix, Ruehin)
4) Add more options for unlocking and purifying in ALL decks
5) Rework anything that clearly has a massive negative impact on a particular deck (Invocation, Usurper)
I don't think it's a lot of work.
