I was thinking about this a bit. Birds of paradise and llanowar elves are not really too powerful. They've just been retroactively given that label. Like a standard with lightning bolt, counterspell, and llanowar elves would be fun and not really a huge problem or anything. But they;'ve kinda removed all these fun staples of magic and generally made them weak, and now the only things that are allowed to be strong are like 3-5 mana creatures. There's exceptions to this if you want to poke holes in my argument but maybe you can kinda see my sentiment. I think personally I've gotten less interested in standard due to this "only midrange" approach. what made me think about this is a friend getting back into magic started mtga and wants to play standard and I realized i just don't care about building a standard deck.