I do believe Xin's *easier* to play now than he was previously. I was terrible with him the first 10-15 matches after I bought him (pre-rework). I got better. Before, he was kind of feast or famine. If you did well early on (and he was built for early game dominance), you snowballed hard. If you got stymied in your lane, you were the red-headed stepchild for pretty much the rest of the game unless you could get on a roll.
Now he's better balanced but lacks that inherent tendency to win early and snowball. Which is a nerf, IMHO.
Feast or famine is not the correct kind of difficulty you want in a champion. It does not result in deep plays or being able to express your skill through the champion. FoF leads to inconsistency.
The thing is, Xin's early game wasn't random. He could be shut down more easily, but that does rely on your lane opponent knowing how to do that and having a champion capable of doing it. Guess what? In high elo draft mode, both of those things are pretty much always true.
The result is a champion that gets worse as players get better. Some people will always talk about how awesome it is to get fed as old Tryndamere, old Twitch, old Evelynn, old Kayle, old Ryze, or any of the other champions that got remade to reduce their feast or famine gameplay. And in pretty much every single case, removing that gameplay was a huge buff that allowed the champion to be played across all skill levels, and allows you to do well based on
your skill, not your reliance on your opponent not knowing how to counter you.
That's a buff, in my opinion.
He used to be such an excellent assassin/Tryndamere-YiThingy. Now he's just a darn bruiser/tankyDPS. He has the same frigging build as Darius everytime I see him.
I consider this funny because Darius doesn't typically use a generic tanky DPS build.