SoP by itself isn't easy mode. Having one of the five best players to ever play the game as general along with three other very strong players contributes. Having a flawed balance system that penalizes stronger elements too much contributes.
SoP didn't really change any of the macro reasons Water was never threatening. It was already an elite stallbreaking element with major holes in what else it could offer in War's metagame. SoP is more powerful than any stallbreak card it had previously, and it does help the element a lot, but Tears is still banned in most tournaments, so it's not like that gap is massive. Again, it's a very powerful card that does a lot for Water, but to say it moves the needle from bottom-tier to easy mode by itself is simply not correct.
Water's similar to Time in some important ways - it gets compared to Earth a lot but I think Time is another good comparison. Many people I talked to about why Water struggled in War pointed to lack of PC as Water's biggest issue. This is a weakness Time not only shares, but struggles with more because of zero shield bypass. But I have no recollection of anyone ever questioning Time being a consistent top-four threat under 10men and Spike, and in fact, if you put more weight on the comparison to Earth, they've been competitive in multiple eras too. Air pre-SoFr was competitive without true PC, too.
This is just the remnants of anti-shard bias. I understand why it existed, but putting shards in war broke up a ridiculously stale meta and enabled it to evolve faster than it had at any point since the last update. A real good example is SoV, a card which was considered trash before Physsion showed it could be utilized effectively. Untapped territory still exists and is still being explored, and while this could have happened without shards, adding them to the food web sped up the process and expanded the potential scope of it.
If you want to hate SoP and SoFr, fine. In some ways I agree, they are definitely problem cards and a solution should be found. But then you also need to be talking about other cards that have dominated War the same way they currently are, and for much longer. Psion defined an era, largely because of Fractal. Graboid, V-Dagger, and the aforementioned Fractal have been in almost every vault in every war. This isn't a definitive list, there are other cards you can throw into this conversation, but the solution is doing more to limit all of these power cards that have too much of an effect on the metagame, not just picking two that happen to share a prefix.
