The thing is, the skill is pretty much only useful against RoW lightning main, against every other main I'd rather have dance so I c*e my mysteries which contains interrupt in the works to just stop my enemy and deal damage to their face.

So if you are complaining that this mystery is too strong, aren't you REALLY complaining that RoW is too strong and too meta for this skill to even be a "thing"?

In servers where there is no lightning meta, no one uses the sage art sand dust
In server where there is, people use it because of the lightning meta

Remember, this isn't a thread discussing if lightning is OP or if lightning IS the meta, it's a thread about sage art sand dust. And in the end, the mystery isn't useful in many servers and isn't the "root" of the problem in other, therefore the mystery is not over powered.

The thing is that sand dust is not a generically useful mystery, but a counter mystery. Ofc, the foremost thing it counters is the lightning RoW, what you describe are other teams that it counter. However, there are also a lot of teams that doesn't run many buffs. Personally I'd only consider sand dust worth using over dance if the enemy team have 3 or more buffs, because at 2, chances are the dance will be more effective if the battle last more than 3 turns. That said, usually main carries a buff and some ninjas like iruka effectively gives 2, so it's not THAT hard to reach 3. Still, only some teams meet the par and it's not universal.

This makes the sand dust very effective if you know who you are going to up against, which means survival (too easy to even matter), plunder and wanted hunting. In most other cases, you don't really know your opponent beforehand and therefore it becomes a gamble. And with gambles, you win some you lose some, it counters some teams and get countered by others, that's actually good game state where no team is supreme. Of course, there are cases where it's not much of a gamble if there are only a few players of concern to think about (everyone else you either beat or get beaten easily) and ALL of them run a certain style of team, then you can go in knowing what would be the most effective. But that's not true in every server/case and is probably a problem in the meta state of the server than anything else.

Rock isn't op, it just counters scissors. If too many people play scissors, the question would be why not play paper.

Does it counter hinate? that I didn't know....
Thou there are other counters, anything with a non-standard attack does, like narutos, kibas and I think certain attacks of some main character.

Here is a weird relevant-ish question.
Can sand dust remove the effect of WB Asuma's Pose of Invincibility (let's say the char gets healed to full after the fact)
Specifically, I'm wondering if Pose of Invincibility is considered a "buff", since it isn't actively applied at any time. In a way, it seems more like a true aura (which quite a few skill appears to be but ends up being buff instead)

So....