Discussions, post-mortems, analysis, inflated egos, and all that jazz.

The issue isn't the game version. It’s just frustrating that necessary changes are being made in HotA, but SoD is not getting them. As a result, SoD ends up being the original version, but with unpleasant bugs that significantly hinder online play. HotA is an improved version, but again, it has a lot of unnecessary things (in my opinion). I would like to see a truly balanced version, but it seems unlikely.

I agree with you; Dirty’s post best describes how many players feel about HotA and SoD, especially those players who play both versions of the game. Many of these players (except perhaps Dark and Herolvi) play both SoD and HotA, but recently most have been preferring HotA precisely because of the lack of “headaches” regarding road blocks and always having a great starting army, which is not the case in SoD. Or, as Jelen recently wrote about the Mirror-3 SoD tournament:

I am withdrawing from the tournament; playing SoD x3DM1 in 2019 is pointless anyway.

At the same time, many strategies that work in SoD do not work in HotA.
But for me, the big question is whether one-sided maps on 6LM, impenetrable blockades, or prison-like situations on the single road in the center on Jeb are considered bugs. All of this has been fixed in HotA, but should it be fixed in SoD? The goal: finding balance or something else? Heroes itself is inherently a random game, as shown by the recent discussion about changing the rules in SoD regarding the Grail. Do we want to achieve balance so that the game is won solely based on skill? Then let’s just play arenas.
After reading Jelen's recent thread /topic/14312/, I have come to the conclusion that balance is generally unattainable, no matter what the developers do. Players will always find something they don’t like, and there will always be suggestions to change existing game mechanics or something else.
We need to develop Heroes: introduce new strategies, hold new tournaments, attract new players.