The thing is Brammers, what William is saying (and I can totally believe is true) is that right now, people bring along PPUs to do nothing but antibuff. So you see lots of antibuffing happening, and you also see many more PPUs than seems to make any sense.
Oh, and monk-o-cron is an ever present threat. Remember that before 2.2, APUs were well down the heirarchy of 1 vs 1 classes (Something along the lines of: Hybrid, Drugged PE, Drugged Spy/PE/Tank, APU, Spy). Yet when it came to OP fights and similar, nothing stopped the APU/PPU combo.
I really don't see most of your logic with what you are arguing here William. The stronger you make PPUs, and the more easy you make it to remove buffs again, the more importance you place on having a 1:1 fighter:PPU setup (once PPUs have lost AB and para, it's never going to make much sense to go past this point, the way it seems it can at the moment). The way to reduce the reliance on PPUs is to make them weaker, not stronger, but able to support more people. So you reduce the strength of foreign shields from the current 30% to say, 20%, but make shields last 10 minutes rather than 3 (and degrade slower too) Or make group buffs easier to use - whatever lets a single PPU support more people. If you want to make fights without PPUs viable, then you need to make it so that a single PPU arriving doesn't tip the scales like it does now - it's just the (roughly) effect of one more person showing up.
Edit @ Doc:
Well yeah, player skill is always going to vary. Not everyone will have or is going to be willing to play the "optimal" - hell, NC has always kinda fetishised playing known-sub-optimal builds as a way of showing off. But we can say from past experience that over time, the bulk of the player base will gravitate towards whatever seems to work best - or at least work easiest. I don't think 10 APU + 10PPU in pairs was ever the "optimal" in 2.0/2.1, but it was increasingly what was seen and what won control of most of the map.
That said, this discussion isn't really mathematical - it's just trying to see what behavior is encouraged/discouraged by the changes being suggested. You don't want to push people into any one optimal too much, or reward "unfun"/punish "fun" play. To an extent preserving variety is what we're seeking here.
Anyway, the general agreement seems to be that it would be best for PPUs to lose antibuff. What (if anything) should replace that is more the debate. I've got my idea of what I think would be best (a new style of APU) - but without playing, it's kinda hard to tell.