Did WG forget the T69 exists?

*rant alert*

So I just played the T69 again after a few years, and holy shit it's bad. It might have been meta back in 2012, but since then it's been powercrept so hard it's not even funny. What's bad about it? It's slow and sluggish. The gun handling is worse than the IS-3 and just slightly better than the Defender, though of course without Russian RNG. The AP shell is borderline unusable at 181 pen, but it doesn't even get a good gold round like the Pershing; noooo, it gets 250 HEAT. Why is that bad? It suffers from the all the downsides of HEAT (absorbed by tracks, absorbed by obstacles, absorbed by black holes on the sides of Russian tanks, no normalization, etc.) while having none of the upsides (high pen – trust me, 250 is not high pen – not for a HEAT round). It has a bit of armor, but nothing you can rely on. The clip layout is nice, 4 x 240 = 960 clip potential with 2 sec. intraclip and ~25 sec. reload, but the gun handling is so bad that in most situations you'll be lucky to pen 2-3 shots out of 4. Forget about sniping. Literally the only thing the T69 is good at is bullying tier 6 and 7s, but what tier 8 isn't? It's pretty much useless once it starts fighting 9s and 10s. There is literally no point to playing this tank. Want a fast autoloader/reloader med? Progetto/Skoda/Lorraine. Want a bit of armor? Somua/T77/Emil. Funny thing is that the T69 is substantially weaker than many of the pref MM premiums, but it faces tier 10. Definitely one of the worst tier 8 meds, and it hasn't been touched in years. I mean, what if the developers of this game, instead of introducing yet another tier 8 premium THATS BASICALLY A BETTER T69 and rolling out yet another money grubbing lootbox scheme-get this-actually balanced their tech tree?? Oh wait the developers are from Wargaming, never mind.

*rant over*

If you suffered through the entire rant you have my commiserations. Have a cookie 🍪