I would like to point out that you can retreat in jin and redo it. Hidan is very easy to counter if you know it's going to be there either through a "trial" run that you retreated from or hearing from others who already did it, so it's not really an issue.

Stage 2 of jin deals very little damage, so it doesn't matter if your team is otherwise bad as long as it counters enemies that need to be countered, namely hidan and sailor sakura(which, w/o ignition, you might not be able to kill at all, especially if someones team does lots of low damage hits). The worst that can happen is that your time end up being bad as a result, but the same applies for everyone for the day so it's not a big deal.

As far as plunder goes, I feel that plunder rewards are vastly exaggerated. Not everyone get to do it 3 times daily, at least not w/o cheating. Vast majority, especially ftp, don't. It's probably only somewhat common in the most populous servers, which are few thanks to new server spawning like rabbits. Fact of the matter is, the new 85 or something is far more reliable, the SS plunder being far more reliable as you only need to get one and more SS convoy are being ran (former plunderer as well as extra ticket runs). So the average reward a player receives probably increased.

I find it funny that plunders would defend the convoy-plunder imbalance by saying that plunder is unreliable whenever anyone complains that plunder is too good compared to convoy. And now that plunder is being nerfed, they estimate the extend of the nerf as if it is not unreliable, basing it on the maximal theoretical value. You don't get it both ways, is it reliable or not? If it is, well, then you agree that plunder is way too good compared to convoy, and the nerf is justified. If it isn't, then it's not much of a nerf so you are not losing out much.

I'm not saying, of course, there aren't people who are significantly negatively impacted, there are. But that only extends to top dogs of at least reasonably active servers, so that's a rather limited population. And to those that claim it's a nerf to ftp, I'd say only a small fraction of those are ftp. The other group that are impacted are the cheaters, be it bots or alts. Well, you will find negative sympathy there, they should be perma banned.

As for 4.... well, init does help damage if you consider barrier, since higher init wins barrier and that's a 40% buff usually. Now, you could break barrier a number of ways, but that tend to either be hard to do or only happen after the enemy have already landed a round of nukes on your face. So lower init really is not conductive to your health. Now, you can win while losing on init, but most such team require at least one super rare ninja and/or not particularly reliable. So it's an uphill battle. I have heard people say that a small fraction of your actual stat carries into arena(like 5 or 10%), I really have no way of proving or disproving that. Won't hurt to be paranoid thou.

I have 5 team sets now, I used to have 8... actually more since SA rotates, but not "at the same time" I guess.

When you fail at something due to your unwillingness to adapt, it stopped being the game's problem.

Granted, I agree with you the hidan thing is probably not something they designed but rather a result of oversight. However, given that for most servers there aren't enough player of each level range to make the time thing competitive, this is now kind of the ONLY challenging bit about the feature. As it were, most people can just auto afk the whole thing. And tbh I feel that rewarding features should require a bit of effort. So until they changed the ranking reward to top 10 OR top 50%(round up), whichever is fewer, I'd vote for hidan to stay as is.